Benjamin Skinner did a very good job of tackling a tremendously complicated and difficult subject in this book. As he points out, there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, but they represent a smaller percentage of the world’s population than previously. “Slavery is a slippery and confounding evil, and persists despite twelve international conventions banning the slave trade, and over three hundred international treaties banning slavery.” It’s been estimated that there are 27 million slaves in the world today. Skinner adopts as his definition of slavery human beings forced to work, through force or fraud, for no pay beyond subsistence.

Skinner admits that his book is not all inclusive. In five years he visited twelve countries and interviewed over 100 slaves, slave dealers, and survivors. However he did not visit or investigate countless other countries (including China) where slavery exists.

Skinner begins his story in Port-au-Prince, Haiti where more than 10,000 street kids, mostly boys as young as six, sell unprotected sex for $1.75. In addition, there are many thousands of domestic slaves called restaveks, children as young as three from rural areas who are given to the traffickers for promises that their children will be well fed and educated (something they don’t have themselves but wish for their children). They are totally unaware that their children will be sold by the trafficker as domestic or sex slaves, starved, beaten, and definitely not educated. During this section of the book Skinner interviews slaves, slave owners, traffickers, local officials whose job it is to stop slavery, church and social organizations trying to help the slaves, and parents who had given up their children in the hopes of bettering their lot.

Skinner then turns to the United States and how the Bush administration is responding, or not, to the question of slavery in the world. He introduces the reader to John Miller, the head of the United States Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Skinner covers in length the dedication and many, many, many hours of work that Miller and his staff expend in trying to make some small difference in the overwhelming tide of slavery. Throughout the book he returns to Miller again and again to show how Miller is responding to each of the challenges in the areas he has visited and how the Bush administration responds, or not, to each.

Throughout the book Skinner visits the Sudan, Romania, Moldova, Turkey, the Netherlands, Dubai, India, and more. In each he exposes a little of the underbelly for us to view, but tells us about much, much more he cannot show us. Through his interviews he depicts slavery with a series of different faces, but always horrifying in whatever form it takes. Skinner cannot show us all the countries, all the faces of subjugation, but he does a good job of explaining the many ways in which slavery exists today, how it's allowed to do so, why it must be stopped, and some of the ways that it could be possible if only enough law, money, force, and power were put behind it. ( )

This was a good book. While I knew that slavery was real and significant, I had never seen many different modern slavery situations put into the context of each other. The writing, however, wasn't to my taste. I suppose it suffered because I was reading it side by side with William Stegner, but I wanted it to feel less journalistic, more measured. I don't know - maybe I was looking for something that this book couldn't have possibly offered. ( )

This was a good book. While I knew that slavery was real and significant, I had never seen many different modern slavery situations put into the context of each other. The writing, however, wasn't to my taste. I suppose it suffered because I was reading it side by side with William Stegner, but I wanted it to feel less journalistic, more measured. I don't know - maybe I was looking for something that this book couldn't have possibly offered. ( )