Word: schlosser
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...amazing that Eric Schlosser is still capable of being shocked. As the author of Fast Food Nation, the best-selling indictment of the burger-and-fries industry, he has peered into some pretty nasty grease traps. But get him started on marijuana laws, and he's almost at a loss for words. "Some of these people are facing 20 years in prison for selling a glass water pipe with a pot leaf on it. I mean, that's just unbelievable. When you think about the fact that the typical convicted murderer in the U.S. does...
Reefer Madness (Houghton Mifflin; 310 pages) is the title of Schlosser's new book, and in it he widens his scope from a single industry to take on the entirety of what he calls America's "underground economy"--that vast, shadowy realm of financial activity that goes unrecorded because it's either illegal or unsavory or both. Like the fast-food business, the underground economy has ballooned over the past 30 years, to about $1 trillion, and Schlosser aims to find out why. He's hunting big conceptual game here, nothing less than America's troubled, hypocritical soul...
...Schlosser concentrates his search on three areas: pot, migrant labor and pornography. (In case you're wondering whether combining porn and economics makes economics interesting or porn boring, it's the former.) He follows the money down some dark alleys: into peep shows and prisons, subterranean high-tech hydroponic pot farms and camouflaged, garbage-strewn encampments of illegal Mexican farmworkers. He introduces us to Reuben Sturman, a humble Cleveland comic-book salesman who became the founding father of America's $10 billion porn industry and who deserves a whole book of his own. We meet Mark Young, a good-natured...