Broken Atlas: The Secret Life of Globalization

The world is flat, the world is spiky, the world is upside down. When it comes to globalization, we've heard it all. Open markets are a tide that lifts all boats. Western culture and technology are homogenizing the world. To award-winning journalist Christopher Frey, none of this sounded exactly right. Even where globalization had reshaped people's lives, what had happened to them was only half as interesting as what they were doing about it.

An idiosyncratic, far-ranging ramble that takes us from the overgrown ruins of Chernobyl to the heart of the dispute between the Turks and Kurds, from a Rio de Janeiro favela buried in a fatal mudslide to the most miserable little rich town you can imagine, Broken Atlas challenges what we think it means to be modern in the twenty-first century. Frey encounters a cast of characters who are taking it upon themselves to define what globalization might be.

Startling, funny, erudite and contentious, Broken Atlas is unlike any other book about global change you've read. Frey shows that to make sense of this new world we're going to have to break a few atlases along the way.

Award-winning writer, editor and documentarian CHRISTOPHER FREY is the Brazil correspondent for Monocle, the international current affairs magazine, and a regular contributor to the Walrus, CBC Radio and the Globe and Mail. He divides his time between Toronto and Rio de Janeiro.