Noreena Hertz gives an evocative and highly readable account of economic change over the past two decades. Such material in the wrong hands can be stultifingly boring, but this is fast and accessible, personal, almost intimate. The reader is left in little doubt of the author's view that not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream (the work is, after all, subtitled Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy). "The 20-year neo-liberal experiment that began in Westminster and Washington has not delivered for all of us".

One would expect to see the names of Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Time Warner, General Electric and McDonalds in any review of the rise and rise of the corporate giant. But Big Brother, Buddha, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Ku Klux Klan and Soylent Green? Noreena Hertz, once an investment banker in Russia, now based at the University of Cambridge, draws attention to the apocalyptic visions of several films of the 1970s. Included in the list is Rollerball, a depiction of life on earth after a series of corporate wars. Anyone who thought that far-fetched in the 1970s might care to reconsider, she ventures to suggest. "A world in which Rupert Murdoch has more power than Tony Blair, and corporations set the political agenda, is frightening and undemocratic", she writes. "We stand today at a critical juncture. If we do nothing... all is lost", she concludes. --Brian Bollen

2007-07-13 Messy and Muddled