A new book vividly portrays human beings coping with daily existence in a disintegrating society but offers an incoherent analysis of what went wrong.
The Bolivarian Cable Train was an elevated railroad planned for a poor neighborhood in Caracas, Venezuela. It ended up running for only three-fifths of a mile and connecting to nothing.
By 2012, four years into the project, the government had spent about $440 million on it and the project was only partly finished. But the country’s socialist leader, Hugo Chávez, decided that he wanted to take a ride on live television. The contractors told his handlers the train wasn’t ready yet; the cable, motors, and machinery had not even been installed.
