UPSIDE DOWN: A PRIMER FOR THE LOOKING-GLASS WORLD
by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried
(Henry Holt)
$24

Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America and the Memory of Fire trilogy combined documentary accuracy and rabid wit to denounce five centuries of corporate looting, from slave- trading multinationals to those IMF-engineered development programs that "work like the philanthropist who put a wooden leg on his piglet because he was eating it bit by bit." In the 30 years since Open Veins, the abuses have worsened, poisoning the earth and ruining the air, but the devious means by which the wealthy strive to get more money become, as Alice would say, "curiouser and curiouser." To introduce this new old world, Upside Down is written as a schoolbook, with "Lectures on Fear" and a "Master Class on Impunity," and well-documented discussions of the backward logic of capital. We learn how Kentucky Fried Chicken funded a private prison contractor called Corrections Corporation of America; how CMS, a manufacturer of land mines, makes a profit of $160 million a year deactivating them. How "green" corporations like Monsanto and DuPont, that profit from environmental contracts and congratulate themselves on the airwaves, are the very multinationals that did the polluting in the first place. Elsewhere, the scarcity of opportunities for advancement have led to private schools for hit men in Medellín; one school in Uttar Pradesh in India even trains poor kids in advanced techniques of theft. But the scariest parts of the book are where Galeano lets the actors speak for themselves. Here's Lee Iacoca:

"When they talk about improving people's educational levels as a solution to the problem of unemployment, I'm always bothered by the memory of what happened in Germany. Education was put forward as the solution to unemployment, and the result was hundreds and thousands of frustrated professionals who turned to socialism and rebellion. It's not easy to admit, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better for the unemployed to smarten up a bit and go straight to McDonald's to find a job."

Upside Down is full of these obnoxious and revealing anecdotes, well illustrated by the engravings of Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), whose Day of the Dead calaveras or skeletons of politicians and bankers cover the margins in a running commentary.

Galeano has a great deal to say about work in a "globalitarian" world. While global trade agreements lubricate the free flow of capital, labor is contained and controlled. "Labor rights have come down to the right to work for whatever you can get under whatever conditions you can stand.... There is no commodity in the world cheaper than labor." According to Galeano, to ensure that U.S. wages are maintained at the current eight-to-one ratio, the U.S. is building a wall like none ever seen in China or Berlin. The huge steel fence on the Mexican-American border will be salmon-colored, and decorated with childrens' artwork. DAVID WISE

LOST AND FOUND

A NEW LOOK AT SHAKESPEARE'S HENRY VI, PART II: SOURCES, STRUCTURE AND MEANING
by Marilynne Summers Robinson
(University Microfilms Inc.)
$57.50

Marilynne Robinson, I like to say, is the whole reason I moved to Seattle and ended up with the life I have. Not that her drenched, perfect novel Housekeeping, set in rural Idaho, made the Pacific Northwest any sort of appealing location. It's just that I had read somewhere that she got her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington, which led me to apply to do the same. The thinking was this--and don't think I don't take great pride in its shrugging stupidity--"If she got a Ph.D. from there and ended up writing Housekeeping, how wrong could I go?"

Eight years and a Ph.D. of my own later, I finally checked her dissertation out from the UW library. I had some hope that it would be covertly lovely, but, well, it's godawful dull. (It's even duller than mine!) Except for some fine, combative sentences, there's almost nothing of the Marilynne Robinson who wrote Housekeeping (or even her more recent nonfiction polemics, Mother Country and The Death of Adam) in the Marilynne Summers Robinson who wrote a 257-page argument that Shakespeare's neglected early work Henry VI, Part II is in fact "a good, sound play" (the sort of topic that even in 1977 must have given off the brackish, backwater scent of unambition). She has said that Housekeeping began as "extended metaphors" that she wrote on the sly during grad school, as a way of showing to herself that she could still write imaginatively without having "to worry about what other people think." Dissertations are all about worrying what other people think, and clearly Housekeeping was written not so much because of her studies, but against them. Which, come to think of it, may be reason enough to go to grad school after all--what more could you ask for than to have something to write against? TOM NISSLEY

Marilynne Robinson reads Mon Jan 8, 7:30 pm, at Benaroya Hall as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures Series. Tickets are $15-$18 ($7.50 if you're a student). Call 621-2230.