Off the Map

Glendinning's freewheeling, lyrical meditation on the human costs of economic globalization fiercely blends the personal and the political. The enemy, as she sees it, is ""corporate imperialism,"" a U.S.-dominated system that pockets the world's raw materials and labor at bargain-basement prices, using the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to snag nations into debt and colonial dependence. In her view, the global economy is unmitigated evil, causing mechanized lifestyles, the destruction of ecosystems and the demise of formerly self-sufficient communities. One chapter, a 1940-onward timeline, records U.S.-backed slaughter and repression in Indonesia, Chile and Vietnam, but neglects to mention Soviet imperialism or Chinese totalitarianism. On a personal note, Glendinning (When Technology Wounds) includes a moving autobiographical account of her decades-long recovery from what she describes as 12 years of rape and psychological torture by her father, a Harvard-educated doctor who also brutally molested her brother, by this account. While these recollections are harrowing, readers will be right to wonder whether calling her abusive father an ""imperialist"" really explains anything. Weaving history, meditation and confessional, her impassioned narrative centers on her horseback ride through northern New Mexico's badlands with Snowflake Martinez, a Chicano cowboy of mixed Mexican, Pueblo and Hispanic descent, who helps launch a movement demanding the federal government's return of his ancestral tribal lands. Though Glendinning sets down their conversations (his sprinkled with Spanish), he mostly remains a faceless, emblematic figure in this self-indulgent chronicle, which repeats and extends the message of her previous books. (Sept.)