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Every day, the human family grows by a quarter of a million people, many of them born into the very countries that can least afford to provide them with jobs, housing, and nutrition, and that are least able to prevent the environmental degradation that rapid population growth can produce.

Award-winning journalist and scholar George D. Moffett has traveled around the world to meet the people who confront the daily reality of the rising numbers - farmers in Kenya, squatters in the slums of Cairo, woman entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, relief workers, holy men, economists, diplomats. History, survey, and policy guide, Critical Masses serves to give warning but also provides a positive presecription for change.

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Publishers Weekly Review

Texts on world demography risk being every bit as dry as the numbers underlying explosive population growth. Moffett, diplomatic correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, avoids that pitfall by placing this critical global quandary within the context of individual lives. From the slums of Mexico City to villages of Bangladesh, he brings into stark relief the effects of overpopulation on the lives of ``real people'' he has interviewed. He demonstrates that family planning initiatives will be successful only when implemented within a holistic social setting, including broad improvements in women's health care and an increase in women's social status and economic options. In locales where this has been largely accomplished, such as Thailand and South Korea, birthrates have fallen. Yet Moffett also stresses that the actual number of births each year has been steadily rising worldwide. We are, he argues convincingly, at a crossroads where appropriate action must be taken. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Moffett's short, clearly written, and basically optimistic look at "the population problem" combines demographic and economic research with compelling personal stories. The solutions it identifies--international public awareness; improved access to family planning services; education and income-producing opportunities for women--are hardly earthshaking, especially after the recent International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the outcome of which this book anticipates. Although containing no startling new revelations, the book does succinctly and cogently express the most important conclusions to emanate from Cairo, and they bear repeating. There are chapters on the impact of population growth on cities, on food production, and on the environment; several chapters (of course) on family planning (the basic model put forward is to reduce the demand for large families by overcoming gender inequalities); and a concise history of US population policy. Along the way, voices from Kenya, Guatemala, Thailand, and Mexico humanize the issues. The author concludes that "the task of attaining population stabilization is both affordable and achievable." All levels. M. A. Gwynne; SUNY at Stony Brook

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

George D. Moffett, Ph.D. , is a diplomatic correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor , and has previously served as its Middle East bureau chief. He co-authored and edited a Monitor series on global population that was awarded a Global Media Award by the Population Institute in 1993. He is the author of The Limits of Victory: The Ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties and Critical Masses: The Global Population Challenge .