>[From the Village Voice]
>
>Global Harming
>by Rick Perlstein
Don't forget this part!
>You might, then, turn to Five Days That Shook the World, a new book
>[credited to Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St Clair] of reporting on
>the antiglobalism activism that began in November 1999 at the WTO
>meeting in Seattle, in which you'll read about Madeleine Albright
>pressuring the mayor of America's most self-consciously liberal city
>to declare the equivalent of martial law (Seattle's mayor resisted
>her request to allow the federal government to take over the
>policing altogether); a civil emergency declared in Detroit (2000
>police in riot gear) for a meeting across the river in Canada;
>police holding kids against jail walls by their necks until they
>turn blue; and police shutting down a Philadelphia convergence
>center based on intelligence that it was being run by "the former
>Soviet-allied World Federation of Trade Unions." But you also might
>put Five Days down in frustration. They say that journalism is the
>first draft of history. That doesn't mean that journalists are
>supposed to publish their first drafts as history.
>
>It's hard to trust a book that hasn't learned some very basic
>lessons in punctuation, doesn't know whether Seattle boasts a "Mayor
>Shell" or a "Mayor Schell," offers its sympathy to war-torn
>"Etitrea"—or boasts of a strong feminist tinge within the movement
>even while leaving off the cover the names of the two people who
>wrote the book's most riveting chapters, both of whom happen to be
>women. (Many of the book's chapters are signed, though none by
>Alexander Cockburn, which isn't surprising since Cockburn's
>delightfully distinctive writing voice is nowhere to be discerned in
>its pages.)
>
>Five Days That Shook the World bears an argument, an important one,
>and one worth chewing on with friends: that rather than having
>forged a triumphant coalition between unionists, Greens, and
>passionate young devotees of "direct action," Seattle and its
>aftermath were successful only when the more radical forces of
>direct action drowned out the enfeebled, establishment-addled voices
>of groups like the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO. But it's carried on
>here in sound bites, ad hominems, macho posturing, and, too often,
>editorial incoherence. I've never seen a more slapdash book. There's
>evil out there. The victims deserve better.