Peadar King | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

This book stems from the television series What in the World? which has been broadcast on RTE television periodically since 2004. Set in Africa, Asia and the Americas, the book features seldom-heard human stories - stories of intense pain and suffering, of small triumphs and occasional advances, of betrayal and complicity, of utter resilience and stout defiance. This book attempts to put in context the heart-rending stories of the poor and displaced people in some of the poorest parts of the planet. Lives blighted by poverty spawned by neoliberal economics, social and cultural imperialism and ideologically-driven class warfare. This is the story of the human cost of flawed ideologies and distorted priorities. In highlighting the corrosiveness of poverty and the violation of human rights at individual, familial and community level, this story clearly establishes the complicity of individual politicians, Western governments and powerful economic institutions in perpetuating the oppression of the world's poor. But equally, it seeks to challenge the sense of fatalism and inevitability that pervades much of the current thinking about global inequality.
This is a story of stubborn witness and resistance by those who are at the bottom of what French film director Costa-Gavras calls "the pyramid of power". Many of these stories are marked by deep anger and a by a sense of bewilderment at how the rest of us, particularly those of us in the Western world, can be so callous and indifferent to the pain of others. To paraphrase Patrick Chabal from his superb 2009 book Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling, this book is about what happens when the camera is fixed at eye-level while engaging with politics as it is played out amongst some of the poorest communities across the globe. This is Peadar King's experience of that story.