World Bank = good! IMF = evil! Advancing that thesis with scholarly flair is Joseph Stiglitz, who wades into the emerging-market-crisis blame-game and finds the IMF -- and friends in the US Treasury -- with blood on their hands.

It's not really a book about globalization. It is a book about what caused Indonesia, Russia, and so on, to crash and crash hard. Stiglitz argues that an intense "market fundamentalist" ideology blinded IMF economists to facts on the ground, and so they forced poor countries to adopt policies that actually worsened their economic crises.

Most of Stiglitz's arguments are still hotly debated. One, though, is now the conventional wisdom -- that IMF advice that poor countries open their capital markets was premature.

The book is a bit sloppily written, seemingly done in a hurry and loosely structured. But considering who wrote it -- the World Bank's chief economist -- it's a crucial tome.