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480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
As in ninteenth-century St. Petersburg, if you're with-it enough to be a worldly resident of your nation's most international city, you're also knowledgeable enough to understand that, through happenstance of history, your society remains yoked to an antiquated political system, a bizarre holdover from the previous century. Walking down Nanjing Road [in Shanghai], with all the world's products for sale and all the world's peoples assembled in the context of political deep freeze, is the closest one can get to strolling down Gogol's Nevsky Prospect in ninteenth-century St. Petersburg.(321)
Dubai is so devoid of natives that, in 2007, the Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing sponsored a series of "Talk to a Local" booths in Dubai shopping malls so tourists could meet a real-life Emirati. (370)
Even in the city's [Mumbai] poshest districts, shantytowns fill any available unclaimed space. A small informal settlement shockingly sits on the same street as the most expensive private home in the world, oil refinery baron Mukesh Ambani's recently completed, American-designed, twenty-seven-story personal high-rise that cost an estimated $1 billion to build. (341)
What Miami had long been for the elite of Latin America - a place to park wealth too risky to keep back home - Dubai became for the magnates and kelocrats of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. The apotheosis of this trend would come in 2009, when the dictator of Azerbaijan amassed nine waterfront mansions during a two-week, $44 million buying spree - all purchased in the name of his eleven-year-old son. (357)