A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE. Encountering and Contesting Development. Eric Sheppard, Philip W. Porter, David R. Faust, and Richa Nagar. The Gildford Press New York London, 2009. 664 pages. ISBN 978-1-60623-262-0.
Geographer Eric Sheppard made his contributions in the field of geographical political economy, globalization, urban sustainability and environmental justice. In his book, A World of Difference, Eric Sheppard focuses on the colonial periphery, the “Third World”, decades and development, neoliberal globalization, the environment, culture, gender, race and natural resources. This book concentrates on the global capitalist development, the local and global actors of globalization and their symbiosis and how global capitalism has affected women, minorities, and the poor. There is a capitalist myopia that is taking the world to new levels of thinking, to new levels of operation; and at the same time, it is affecting negatively the environment. The author explains the basin data on the global economy and explains the measures of development: global national income (GNI) “is nonetheless widely used as a way of measuring the economic productivity of countries” (p. 26) ; physical quality of life index (PQLI) “ is a composite index based on three measures: our life expectancy at age 1, our literacy, and our society’s rate of infant mortality” (p. 33); and human development index (HDI) “ combines three measures of well being: (1) life expectancy, (2) education( in which the adult literacy rate counts two-thirds and average years of schooling count one-third); and (3) purchasing power” (p. 34). Eric Sheppard and (Porter, Faust, & Nagar, 2009) organized his book in three parts. Part I, “Differentiated Ways of Knowing”, covers the terminology of Third World comes from, and how poverty and slavery have become a key part in capitalism.