Capitalism: A Ghost Story - Hardcover

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize and has written several non-fiction books including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, and Walking with the Comrades. She is a contributor to the Verso anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.

Courageous and clarion Roy (Walking with the Comrades, 2011) continues her analysis and documentation of the disastrous consequences of unchecked global capitalism. She investigates India’s “Gush Up” capitalism and how it is reinforcing a caste system that benefits the elite while wreaking cruel havoc on the greater population and the country’s invaluable natural resources. Roy reports on collusion between New Delhi and multinational corporations that results in the corruption and dysfunction of local governments and brutal initiatives, disguised as security measures, in which people are forced off their land to make way for highways, airports, dams, mines, and factories. While violence is used against the poor, the middle class is covertly coerced by way of what Roy calls the “exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.” She cites eye-opening examples of how the support by well-established international foundations of admirable cultural projects and NGOs also insidiously engenders privatization and the infiltration of grass-roots movements against corporate pillaging. As Roy observes, “The algebra of infinite injustice works in mysterious ways.” Precise and revelatory, Roy gives us an awful lot to think about. --Donna Seaman