If a book is going to be abridged like this one, chances are that it's intended for mildly curious readers who want to know, "just what are they protesting about the WTO anyway?", rather than for the scholar or intellectual activist. But I'm afraid that this book forgets its likeliest audience. For such an audience, the more effective approach would have been to describe the most extreme and outrageous WTO scenarios, leaving the reader outraged at the moral and political injustices! Instead, this book gives brief desriptions of these, and then mixes in more technical (yet abridged) histories and terms and procedural issues with the WTO. In short, it left in too much of the nuts-and-bolts when it should have displayed more of the outrageous effects on human rights, environment, national sovereinty, labor, toxins, etc.
A second shortcoming is that the book assumes its reader is sympathetic to such concerns (environment, labor, culture, etc.). What we need is a book directed at Conservatives, explaining to them why the WTO is an insult to conservative values by supplanting the laws created by a sovereign nation, overwhelming our Constitution in favor of corporate-managed meddling, and actually defying the concept of "free trade" with shockingly-entrenched meddling from an organization that does not have the U.S.'s sovereign interests in mind.
Lori Wallach has got to be on her way to a Nobel Prize. She has hit an exposed nerve of the corporate system, and illuminated it in a manner that moves tens of thousands. This book, a very short version of a much longer study, is very cogent and well-documented. The bottom line is clear: the WTO operates in secrecy, for the convenience of corporations, and is systematically undermining and overturning higher standards of protections and sanctions related to the protection of children, public safety, and the environment.
It merits comment that Wallach (and her lesser known co-author, Michelle Sforza) would never have reached as many people with their thinking in the absence of the Open Media Pamphlet Series. This series is addictive, brilliant, and consistently cuts to the heart of major issues.