John Bowe has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, McSweeney's, This American Life, and many others. He is the co-editor of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs; editor of Us: Americans Talk About Love, and author of Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. He co-wrote the screenplay for the movie Basquiat. He is a recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Hillman Prize, the Richard J. Margolis Award, and the Harry Chapin Media Award, for reporting on hunger-and poverty-related issues. He was born in Wayzata, Minnesota. He currently lives in New York City.
At first glance, these two books about slavery today seem very similar. Each is written in an engaging, conversation tone, and each recounts the author's personal quest to examine and understand slavery now while offering brief historical surveys of the subject. Antislavery activist Bales (emeritus, Roehamption Univ., London; Understanding Global Slavery) travels the globe from India to Ghana to the United States interviewing slaves and weaving in a radical reading of the global civil rights movement from World War II. He relies so heavily on firsthand accounts that his book verges on being oral history. Pure oral history might have been better, but Bales inserts his memoirs of his activism along with pleas for funding and tips for starting your own movement. His book is the angrier of the two, meant to provoke as much as to inform. Bowe (coeditor, GIG: Americans Talk about Their Jobs) has written a book more for the head than the speen. He focuses his study on Florida, Oklahoma, and the U.S. Commonwealth of Saipan. While Bales focuses on what "they" are doing to slaves, Bowe focuses on what "we" are doing to slaves. His extended examinations dicuss the economic motivations and impact of slavery today but make facile connections between consumerism and slave owning and often "show" more thatn they "tell." The information and conclusions of both books are largely the same, but the tone is a vital distinction. Bowe saves the bulk of the moralizing (a fatalistic diatribe against American culture) for his conclusion, while Bale's invective seems unrelenting throughout, even if one agrees with it. Both books are accessible starting points for a difficult topic and are recommended, as such, for undergraduate and public libraries.--Robert Perret, Southwestern Coll., Winfield, KS Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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