Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, the Global Economy, and Other Earthly Whereabouts FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this book, Chellis Glendinning charts the course of empire across countries and continents and on into individual minds, hearts, and bodies - and it all happens within the story of her horseback ride through the wilds of New Mexico with her friend the Indo-Hispanic vaquero, Snowflake Martinez.. "As their dreamlike journey unfolds, Chellis and Snowflake strive to understand the results of their ancestors' fatal encounter - hers, the "people of empire"; his, "the colonized" - weaving together current events with their childhood memories and the forces of history to reveal the extent of imperialism's legacy - and to find a way "off the map," to a more hopeful future for us all.
FROM THE CRITICS
Napra Review
A personal exploration of the evolution of Western imperialism into today's "empire" and the impact it has on place, politics, and passion for life.
Publishers Weekly
Glendinning's freewheeling, lyrical meditation on the human costs of economic globalization fiercely blends the personal and the political. The enemy, as she sees it, is "corporate imperialism," a U.S.-dominated system that pockets the world's raw materials and labor at bargain-basement prices, using the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to snag nations into debt and colonial dependence. In her view, the global economy is unmitigated evil, causing mechanized lifestyles, the destruction of ecosystems and the demise of formerly self-sufficient communities. One chapter, a 1940-onward timeline, records U.S.-backed slaughter and repression in Indonesia, Chile and Vietnam, but neglects to mention Soviet imperialism or Chinese totalitarianism. On a personal note, Glendinning (When Technology Wounds) includes a moving autobiographical account of her decades-long recovery from what she describes as 12 years of rape and psychological torture by her father, a Harvard-educated doctor who also brutally molested her brother, by this account. While these recollections are harrowing, readers will be right to wonder whether calling her abusive father an "imperialist" really explains anything. Weaving history, meditation and confessional, her impassioned narrative centers on her horseback ride through northern New Mexico's badlands with Snowflake Martinez, a Chicano cowboy of mixed Mexican, Pueblo and Hispanic descent, who helps launch a movement demanding the federal government's return of his ancestral tribal lands. Though Glendinning sets down their conversations (his sprinkled with Spanish), he mostly remains a faceless, emblematic figure in this self-indulgent chronicle, which repeats and extends the message of her previous books. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
A psychologist, poet, and social activist, Glendinning uses many images to express her thoughts about the modern world. Here her views on imperialism and ecology are interspersed with descriptions of her horseback exploration of the northern New Mexico desert accompanied by an Indo-Hispanic cowboy named Snowflake Martinez. Glendinning leaps from discussions of world history to her own experiences of child abuse to the struggles of the Hispanic farmers of northern New Mexico, linking all these as facets of imperialism. She makes some interesting connections between these ideas, but her stream-of-consciousness style may be hard for some readers to follow. No translation is provided for the Spanish-language dialog, which will prevent some readers from fully understanding Glendinning's conversations with Snowflake and others. For larger collections.--Gwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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