Wow. This *is* a book everyone should read. I'd heard about bits of slavery here and there in modern times. After I heard Bales on NPR and read about his work in Scientific American and the Sun, I was eager to get ahold of this book. But I had no idea that the horror was so widespread.

Bales writes with clearness and imagination, yet is thoroughly scientific and researched. He followed sociological procedures and didn't merely report on other's ideas, but did primary research himself with a set variable questionnaire. All of this work makes his arguments irrefutable.

Disposable People traces the three main types of slavery- old fashioned chattel slavery, debt slavery (the largest) and contract slavery (the fastest growing), in five different empirical countries. The first case of contract slavery in Thailand I found the most horrendous- families selling their daughters into slave-prostitution and death by AIDS, for the price of a colour TV. The case of chattel slavery in Mauritania was the most interesting- Arab Muslims speaking of their black slaves as their children, who need to be guided by a firm hand, but are inferior; who are fed the bare minimum to work and live, and not allowed to go to school. A place where the children of a female slave become the property of the slave owner, whether or not he is the father, and women can be kept as slaves by the claim that they are actually the wife of the slave owner, who has on his side the Qur'an's stipulation that one may have sex with one's female slaves. It was all too reminiscent of the antebellum period. Bales' weakest arguments were in regards to the form of slavery in India. While there is certainly slavery there, and it appears to be the oldest continual slavery in the world, the farming he described seemed to be more sharecropping than slavery- there was little reference to the violence that forced people to remain with their land lord/slave holder.

This book needs to be read because we need to stop this. Twenty-seven million people in the world are in slavery, and many of the products we rely on and use every day are made by them. This should not be. It can not be.

I first glanced this book becasue I was in need of information for my school project, and then I fell deeply into this book as it revealed things that I had fuzzy understanding in clear illustrations and explanations. Instead of giving abstract reports that abuses happened in some part of the world at certain time in certain way, the author presented a live descritption of the abuses and analyzed the reason and structure of modern slavery so reader could easily understand how this exploitation machine works.

This powerful informative book cleary examines the slavery in our backyards. Though many every day citizens may be unaware of slavery, our government and big business know what's going on and have systematically denied/ignored it. Most of the slavery involves people of color and women--groups that are repeatedly ingored and abused. If you want to get an idea of what's happening in the US and the world read this book. Become aware, don't invest in companies that do business with societies that accept slavery, and know what you're getting into when you travel abroad. My only regret was that something so horrible is so difficult to fight.