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A few days ago, the azalea in our front garden was blooming splendidly. |
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A light snow fell... |
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By morning, the blossoms were smothered. |
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And as the snow melted, almost all the blossoms fell to the ground. |
On page 15, a fortune-teller discerns a very unexpected future for Alice. Because of her visceral reaction to the fortune-teller’s prediction, Alice soon afterwards travels to Istanbul with her next-door neighbor. The rest of the novel is a quest to discover the truth of the prediction. It’s a long quest, which many readers probably find quite suspenseful and enjoyable, but again, I found it a bit too full of cliches. (I’ll forgo presenting plot details since you might want to read it and find out for yourself.)
All in all, I found Alice’s story to be a kind of over-the-top melodrama. The descriptions of Istanbul seemed mostly the sort of thing that you could find in a 1950s guidebook. Alice’s air travel from London to Istanbul was presented with all the expected details from the early days of commercial plane travel. On arrival, Alice and her travel companion checked into the Pera Palace Hotel — which was the major high-end place for famous European visitors from early in the twentieth century until the end of World War II. By 1950 when the novel takes place it was actually a bit run down because of political choices made by the Turkish government (its Greek owners were expelled and it was given to a native/Moslem Turk), but the decline doesn’t seem have happened in the book. And on and on.
There were also some questionable details — small ones but they bothered me. For example, Alice’s traveling companion brings her a beautiful evening gown to wear to an event at the British Embassy. She says it’s lovely and he says:
“It’s a French model called the ‘New Look.’ They might not be much at the art of war, but I have to admit that the French have an undeniable genius for dressing women ... .”
Remember, the novel is set in the year 1950. Dior’s “New Look” debuted in Paris in 1947 and was a sensation, noted throughout the world. To show you how famous this was: the term “New Look” was coined by Life magazine. So the characters’ unfamiliarity with the style by 1950 is a bit off. This is a detail, but the kind of detail that disrupts my trust in a a historical novel.
Alice Pendelbury’s distinguishing feature was her acute sense of smell:
“Alice had a rare gift: she was a ‘nose.’ Her sense of smell was so acute that she could distinguish and memorize the slightest odor. She spent her days alone, bent over the long wooden table in her flat, blending different essences to obtain combinations that might one day become a perfume. Every month she made the rounds of the London perfume shops, offering them her new creations.” (p. 6)
Throughout the book Alice is highly aware of aromas and the way they trigger her memories. She seeks out unusual combinations of fragrance that create a characteristic ambience, and she designs perfumes and other aromatic products. Normally, I would find this a very compelling theme in a novel. Unfortunately, I thought that like many things here, the depiction of smells and the memories they elicited was presented in a formulaic and mechanical way. Again, I found this a source of disappointment.
Similarly, the descriptions of food in this novel seem done by rote. The scarce groceries in London, the cups of coffee, the Turkish breakfasts, and the fine restaurants were all described in a way that I found too predictable, too superficial, and too close to what I’ve read in many other accounts of travel. I was also a little skeptical about the accuracy: for example, eggs, meat, and bacon were rationed until 1954, but the characters seem to find at least some of them in the shops. Maybe they had ration cards or something for the small quantities they bought; this wasn’t mentioned and again is only a detail.
I’m sure my reactions to this novel are eccentric: many readers obviously find this author very compelling. Sorry to be a malcontent. This book was one of 10 free books offered on Kindle this month. The author was on my “maybe read” list so I went for it. I hope I more throughly enjoy the others I chose.
Blog post © 2021 mae sander.
“THERE ARE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT FORCE YOU TO CHOOSE WHAT TO believe, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been the kind of person who chooses to believe what people consider verifiable, science over religion, the rational over the transcendental. But the eel makes that difficult. For anyone who has seen an eel die and then come back to life, rationality isn’t enough. Almost everything can be explained; we can discuss different processes of oxygenation and metabolism or the eel’s protective secretion or its highly adapted gills. But on the other hand, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’m a witness. An eel can die and live once again. ‘They’re odd, eels,’ Dad would say. And he always seemed mildly delighted...” (p. 192)
"For some reason, this gift from God to the early pilgrims has been all but erased from the grand narrative. The story of the colonization of North America is full of myths and legends, but the story of the eel isn’t one of them. On Thanksgiving, Americans eat turkey, not eel, and other animals—buffalo, eagles, horses—have been the ones to shoulder the symbolic weight of the patriotic narrative of the United States of America." (p. 104).
“In Italy, glass eels used to be caught in the Arno River in the west and around Comacchio in the east. There the preferred way of serving them was boiled in tomato sauce with a sprinkle of parmesan. ...These days, however, it’s a dying tradition. As the number of glass eels wandering up Europe’s rivers has plummeted, the fishing industry built around them has also ceased to exist.” (p. 90)
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Eel restaurant sign, Comacchio, Italy. (Source) |
Here’s why I loved this passage: we once stayed in a hotel in the vicinity of Comacchio, and we went to a highly recommended restaurant where I remember eating a dish of glass eels (though I thought they had said grass eels and just found out that this was wrong). The eels on my plate were indeed very small and exotic, but I liked the dish. I don’t think in fact that they were in tomato sauce. It was long ago, before I carried a camera with me at all times, so I have no tangible evidence of this meal, only an indistinct memory. As eels become more and more endangered, it’s likely that this dish will no longer be prepared, and in any case it’s become very expensive, so I doubt if I will ever taste it again.
To quote another poet besides Shakespeare (after all, it’s National Poetry Month) —
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour” — by William Blake
Blog post © 2021 mae sander.
Kefir used to be an exotic drink, but it's now available in most supermarkets, at least where I shop. It was popularized in the US by the Lifeway company, beginning in 1986, but now is made by a number of brands. Kefir's origins are in Russia and several other countries in the East (for more history see the Wikipedia article).
For some time, Len and I have been enjoying this yogurt-like beverage. We also like other fermented milk products such as yogurt, buttermilk, sour cream, and many types of cheese -- a large family of foods that vary widely in taste and in how they are used in many different recipes.The yeasts and bacteria in the cultures for each type of fermented dairy product are related to one-another, but not all the same. The processes for making them, such as the temperature and length of time for fermentation, also differ among the products, whether at home or in an industrial setting. Like sourdough starters for fermenting bread, you can buy commercial starters for home-made cultured milk products.
SCOBY is the name for these starter cultures. I thought it was a cute pet name but it's actually an acronym: "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast." When you make yogurt or sour cream, you can save out some of the product to use as the starter for the next batch. Kefir is a little different.
The starter for traditional kefir-making, which is what you would use if you wanted to make it at home for yourself, is made up of a cluster of fermentation-starter grains that are described as looking like cauliflower.![]() |
Kefir "grains" shown with scale. Source: Wikipedia. |
"Kefir is a complex fermented dairy product created through the symbiotic fermentation of milk by lactic acid bacteria and yeasts contained within an exopolysaccharide and protein complex called a kefir grain. ... The beverage itself typically has a slightly viscous texture with tart and acidic flavor, low levels of alcohol, and in some cases slight carbonation. Kefir is traditionally made with cow’s milk but it can be made with milk from other sources such as goat, sheep, buffalo, or soy milk. One of the features that distinguish kefir from many other fermented dairy products is the requirement for the presence of a kefir grain in fermentation and the presence and importance of a large population of yeasts. The aforementioned kefir grains are microbially derived protein and polysaccharide matrices that contain a community of bacterial and fungal species that are essential to kefir fermentation. Traditionally, fermentation was initiated through the addition of kefir grains, which originally formed during the fermentation of milk, to unfermented milk in a sheep or goat skin bag. Commercial, industrial-scale production rarely utilizes kefir grains for fermentation, but rather uses starter cultures of microbes that have been isolated from kefir or kefir grains in order to provide more consistent products." (quote from: The Microbiota and Health Promoting Characteristics of the Fermented Beverage Kefir.)
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Ann Arbor’s most famous mural: five authors, painted 1984. New on the same building: views of the town. |
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The new mural with two scooters in front of it. The State Theater, depicted in the mural, is down the street. |
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Detail from the new mural. |
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The State Theater, 2021. |
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The State Theater’s Grand Opening, 1942. (source) |
The most famous mural in Ann Arbor:
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Five authors: Woody Allen, Edgar Allan Poe, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, and Anaïs Nin. (Blog post here) |
"A common refrain in historic cookbooks about rather than by black cooks is that these cooks made delicious food through some kind of mystical power, an innate talent, rather than through honed skills and hard work. It’s a stereotype that, while on the surface complimentary, only served to pigeonhole and limit black cooks by declaring them inscrutable and denying them their earned wisdom and abilities to adapt, learn, and create." (p. 128).
“With so much knowledge and experience in the community, it’s no surprise that black inventors developed ways to turn out perfect loaves, rolls, muffins, and cakes without all the strenuous and time-consuming effort. In 1875, Alexander P. Ashbourne devised a spring-loaded die cutter that cut biscuits into a variety of thin, uniform shapes. Two years later, Joseph Lee, known as the ‘bread specialist,’ designed a bread crumb machine to reuse stale bread. In 1884, Willis Johnson of Cincinnati patented an improved mechanical egg beater with two chambers that allowed a cook to beat eggs in one section and mix batter in the other, and Judy Reed patented a hand-operated dough kneader and roller. And in the mid-twentieth century, Lucille Bishop Smith, a chef, home economist, entrepreneur, and author, developed and sold the first packaged hot roll mix—a commercial product that was a boon to housewives. ...“Distinctively endowed. Professionally grounded. Supremely industrious. The recipes in this chapter memorialize these innovators as role models, equipped as they were with an inheritance from ancestors who fashioned flatware from oyster shells, carved mortars and pestles from tree logs, sewed baskets for winnowing rice using bones and sweetgrass, burned corncobs to make baking soda, and distilled salt from the soil under a smokehouse.” (p. 83)
Besides the fascinating documentation of this history, the recipes look scrumptious. Along with her own, modernized recipes, the author provides old recipes in their original format, to allow you to compare and judge what the historic version would have been like -- or to cook the original, if you wish. In addition, the illustrations are beautiful. Here is an example: Rice Muffins, a recipe belonging to the rice-growing tradition of South Carolina, from the chapter on bread and baked goods:
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Rice Muffins, inspired by Plantation Recipes by Leslie Bowers, published 1959. (p. 106) |
"Service workers who had fought for social status during the post–Civil War years by continuing to work in 'every day' careers gradually moved into the privileged class. Culinary arts helped them resist illiterate servant stereotypes, such as Mammy and Aunt Jemima, the way that the creative, visual, musical, theatrical, and cultural arts promoted notions of the 'New Negro' during the Harlem Renaissance." (p. 122).
"And while the pain of enslavement reverberates for centuries, and through the centuries, too, black bakers have used their skills and savvy to create wealth, self-sufficiency, and generations of protégés to carry on their legacy and to build their own economic power." (p. 263).
Finally, I want to emphasize the appeal of the recipes in this book! I have not made any yet, but I love some of the ideas like the Savanah pickled shrimp, sweet potato salad, bread pudding, okra dishes, jambalaya, and many more. I'll end with a very intriguing tradition that I am sure I'll never have the nerve to try:
“Bake a sweet potato pie, a coconut pie, a custard pie, a mincemeat pie, and an apple pie. After removing from pie plate, stack each pie on top of each other. Press the stack gently, then cut into thin wedges so that everyone gets a taste of each pie.” (p. 303, quoted from author Charlemae Rollinsee)
Book review © 2021 mae sander.
You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey is a serious book about racism in America. It relates stories of racist behavior, which are presented as “funny.” But they aren’t funny. They are painful. If you like to see other people insulted, humiliated, threatened, terrorized, belittled, and deprived of opportunities then I feel sorry for you. And maybe you’ll find this book funny. I can’t find it funny. It hurts me to read it. And I believe that every word is true.
I respect the authors for their effort to clarify racism, while trying to lead sane lives in the face of such evil. I respect their way of laughing at adversity. They can’t even experience laughter through tears (see the quote below for why no tears). Here are some serious quotes from the book:
“As we have learned, sometimes something racist happens to you and you don’t do a thing. You let people drown to death in a pool of racist thoughts and actions, as is your god-given right. You are only one person. You are not the Black ambassador to the United States. If people haven’t figured it out, it’s their problem. And sometimes you stand up and explain why they shouldn’t be doing or saying whatever insane thing they said.” (p. 100)
“I never tell white people that story because they can’t frigging stand hearing it. Honestly, they look like they’re in pain as they’re listening to me tell it and are annoyed that they have to carry this information around with them. I have never been able to understand why white people have such a low tolerance for hearing about racism. I mean, we have to live it! The least you could do is nod your head. The previous and the following are just two of the many reasons why Black people don’t want to talk about race with you.” (p. 124)
“A quick note about white tears: Why? Why do they work so well? It’s truly a great defense against being called a racist. I mean, it doesn’t work for Black people. Can you imagine if Black people cried every time we were called a name? Every time we were accused of something we didn’t do? Tell you what, I would be carrying around tissues at all times (not just when I go see musicals). I think, when a white person accused of racism cries, people think, Oh no. I need to fix this. White people shouldn’t cry. They should never have to cry! I think when white people see white people cry, they relate and feel sorry for them. And when white people see Black people cry, they can’t relate. Even though Black people have a billion things to cry about. Maybe it just boils down to the fact that white vulnerability is valuable and Black vulnerability puts the Black person in danger.” (p. 148)
“...this is real life and it does not stop. These stories only reaffirm where we are. They don’t shine a light on anything new.” (p. 202)
“My mother had drummed it into me from childhood that you shouldn’t bother people at home when it was time to have a meal. For better or for worse, this had seeped into my being and become a reflexive habit.” — Murakami, First Person Singular, (p. 59)Haruki Murakami — always a favorite. I couldn’t resist this small collection of stories (published last week) even though some of the stories weren’t new to me. I had read around half of them when originally published in the New Yorker.
Murakami has been a Beatles fan for a long time (remember his book titled Norwegian Wood). The story titled “With the Beatles” contains memories of Beatles music from the narrator’s adolescence, when the Beatles were releasing their famous songs. But it’s a very sad story about growing old — to summarize it quite crudely. And it doesn’t even have any magical realism, just sadness. The strangest thing is that I recognized my own past just a bit in the story, which I usually don’t do in Murakami. For example, the sentence at the top of this review about his mother’s principle of leaving when someone is about to eat: my mother drummed exactly the same thing into my head when I was growing up.
The New York Times reviewer, David Means, writes of this collection:
“Whatever you want to call Murakami’s work — magic realism, supernatural realism — he writes like a mystery tramp, exposing his global readership to the essential and cosmic (yes, cosmic!) questions that only art can provoke: What does it mean to carry the baggage of identity? Who is this inside my head in relation to the external, so-called real world? Is the person I was years ago the person I am now? Can a name be stolen by a monkey?”
Murakami’s novels are often too long. This collection is too short.
Review © 2021 mae sander.
Miriam recently created a playlist of songs that mention food. She played them on a radio show at the University of Virginia station, where she sometimes substitutes for the usual host. She started with some that mentioned fruits (though they were not really about eating). I'm not familiar with these songs except of course the first -- I am a big fan of the Beatles!
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The Beatles and the Strawberry Fields children's home. (source) |
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"Cherry"from "Cherry" |
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"Kiwi" - Harry Styles |
"In the commercial, a camera pans across faces of all shapes, colors and ethnicities, as they sing from a hilltop in Manziana, Italy, 'I’d like to buy the world a Coke.' ... The song hit radio stations on Feb. 12, 1971, and it gained immediate popularity. DJs immediately began receiving calls asking them to play the jingle, as if it were a song by The Doors or the Jackson 5. It was so popular, it began to affect the pop charts. The Hillside Singers had recorded the original vocals, and that version peaked at number 13. Backer had the New Seekers record a slightly different version of the song, titled “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony),” which peaked at number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100."
I enjoyed hearing Miriam's playlist of music that was new to me, as I love to connect to the use of food in many contexts. I added the Coke song because I like to share a beverage reference with Elizabeth and other bloggers at her weekly drink event at the blog Altered Book Lover.
blog post © 2021 mae sander with help from miriam.
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After a year of being shut in, I was happy to be walking around the Liberty Street area of our town, and to take a look at Graffiti Alley, where several artists were working on the wall art. |
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The art work of Graffiti Alley has been evolving since 1999, and is constantly repainted by anyone who wants to add to the murals on the walls. |
"A couple visiting a street art exhibition at a mall in Seoul unknowingly vandalized an abstract painting by American artist JonOne, said to be worth $500,000, painting three large dark splotches across its surface.The artist is "known for his Abstract Expressionist-style graffiti." I find this extremely funny! Especially as the $500,000 work of art looks to me just like the ones in Graffiti Alley, except that it's normal to paint over the walls in Graffiti Alley. I was happy to learn that the couple who painted on the mural were not charged with a crime.
"The couple were confused by the array of brushes and paint tubes scattered on the ground beneath the canvas. They were meant to reflect the creative process of the artist, but the unwitting pair mistook the display for an invitation to add to the work."
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Above: original work. Below: defaced work. Big whoop? (source: ArtNet News) |
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In Spring you can fly a kite in the park. |
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You can lie on the grass with your laptop. |
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You can ride a bike or take a walk in the neighborhood. |
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You might have to wait for a tennis court. |
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You can come out of hibernation like Kathy’s Bear! |
Blog post © 2021 mae sander.
In the book Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas, author Marc Levinson traces the history of internationalized sourcing of materials, as we are accustomed to thinking about it. He traces several waves of globalization that altered the production methods for goods that our lives depend on, including food, cars, iPhones, and many other commodities and products. He explains the way that shipping companies exploded the size and speed of container ships until the economies of scale were distorted, and the way that demand for their shipping services first grew and then shrunk, until now many of the ships are vastly under-utilized, and the biggest companies are in trouble. According to Levinson, a backlash against globalization has been changing many features of worldwide manufacturing and distribution endeavors.
Present-day manufacturing, Levinson explains, involves much more than just assembling parts procured through tightly-organized supply chains, as was done in the twentieth century. He traces the development of "value chains" that in the mid-20th century created a much more complex web of dependency among international manufacturers, and relied on entities in complex and loosely-organized chains. Levinson outlines the ways that this concept worked, including the major role of cheap shipping on ever-increasing container ships. He explains the benefits that derive from value chains, and also the many disadvantages -- not the least of which is a shipping incident like the one in Suez last month. Interestingly, he shows how the interdependence of factories on far-flung sources of parts has been diminishing in what he calls a "fourth wave" of globalization.
Above all, the driving force behind value chains came to be intellectual property. The design of complex products, the planning of how to build them, the calculation and negotiation of how to source their parts, and the creation of internal software for many types of modern goods means that there is often much more value from intangibles than from physical components. An important consequence is that old views of import and export surpluses and trade balances no longer illustrate the real economic impact of multiple countries' and corporations' roles in production and design. Politicians often fixate on only the physical components that may be manufactured outside their countries and their tax base, when the major value of a modern product like a car or a smart phone is in intellectual property, not in hardware. Levinson explains a great deal about the way that globalized value chains work and how this is changing right now. A new global model for manufacturing is emerging, so I guess he will be able to write a third book. (His first was called The Box, and is a history of container shipping.)
Outside the Box is a complex work of economic history. Sometimes when reading it, I felt bogged down in too much detail. Other times I just didn't feel sure I understood the big picture. Overall, it's a book worth reading. I don't feel as if I can do it justice in a review, but here are a few more thoughts.
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A Model-T Ford at Greenfield Village in 2012. |
"Any business faces risks, and supply chains inherently pose risks aplenty: fire might strike the plant of a key supplier; a problematic lock on a river might block shipments of an essential raw material; a gasoline shortage might make it difficult for production workers to reach their jobs. Once, manufacturers managed this risk by controlling their supply chains directly. The exemplar, Ford Motor Company, owned forests, mines, and a rubber plantation; transported raw materials to its factories on a company-owned railroad; and built blast furnaces, a foundry, a steel rolling mill, a glass factory, a tire plant, and even a textile plant at its vast River Rouge complex near Detroit, where sand, iron ore, and raw rubber were transformed into auto parts and assembled into Model A cars." -- Marc Levinson, Outside the Box (p. 153).
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My iPhone |
"Consider how the iPhone 3G’s complicated supply arrangements registered in merchandise trade statistics. China exported approximately $2 billion of the phones to the United States in 2009. Apple, on the other hand, exported no goods directly from the United States to China, and other US-made components shipped to the iPhone manufacturing plant were worth only $100 million or so. Thus, if either country had published official statistics covering trade in iPhone 3Gs, they would have shown China to have a $1.9 billion trade surplus with the United States. Yet in reality, the US-China relationship in iPhones tilted in the other direction. The total value that was added in China to all the iPhone 3Gs shipped to the United States in 2009, at $6.50 per phone, came to about $73 million, or less than the value of the US-made components shipped to China. Almost ten times as much of the phone’s value originated in Japan as in China, but when those iPhones were shipped from China to the United States, they did not affect the official US trade deficit with Japan at all." (p. 135).
Subsequently, Levinson explains, China tried to make their share more profitable: "A dozen years later, nearly two-thirds of the value of Chinese manufactured exports was created within China." (p. 168).
"Is globalization over? Not by any stretch. Rather, it has entered a new stage. While globalization is retreating with respect to factory production and foreign investment, it is advancing quickly when it comes to the flow of services and ideas." (p. 224).
"Around 2011, as the result of independent decisions by some of the world’s largest companies, trade patterns began to shift as multinational companies reconsidered their value chains. The effects showed up not only in export and import figures, but also in a set of obscure calculations that track the extent to which one country’s manufacturers use inputs that were imported from another country. In 2011, these OECD data show, 42 percent of the value of South Korea’s exports—things like Hyundai cars and Daewoo tanker ships—came from imported materials and components; six years later, the corresponding figure was only 30 percent. For China, imported content was 23 percent of the value of manufactured exports in 2011, but only 17 percent five years later. The United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden all experienced the same trend. So did Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There are only two likely explanations. One is that manufacturers in these countries cut back on exporting goods that used a lot of foreign inputs. The other is that they decided to obtain more of their inputs at home rather than sourcing them abroad. Either way, manufacturing became less global." (pp. 214-215).
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In China, there are thousands of KFC outlets. |
"Companies in industries whose products are intangible—software, accommodation, real estate, computer services—accounted for a greater share of the largest multinational enterprises, while major industrial companies shrank under relentless competitive pressure. In the emerging Fourth Globalization, moving ideas, services, and people around the world mattered more than transporting boatloads of goods—and seemed likely to create very different sets of winners and losers." (p. 219).
The conclusion of the book takes us almost to the present moment with the question of how the Covid-19 pandemic will affect the future.
"By bringing international travel almost to a stop after airlines cancelled flights and governments directed arriving passengers to spend two weeks in quarantine, COVID-19 forced firms to manage their foreign interests without customary site visits and face-to-face meetings, and travel-weary executives may not be eager to return to the old ways even after the virus is a distant memory." (p. 227).
Levinson obviously can't predict the future, but he offers quite a lot of economic history to help envision how life may change and how it might go on with some of the same relationships and ideals among countries and within corporations. It's a difficult book to read, but very interesting.
Review © 2021 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.