Footnotes in Gaza - Joe Sacco
Another great effort by Joe Sacco. Joe is in a category all his own - graphic novelist/journalist. In the vein of his other great work, Palestine, this time Sacco returns to Gaza to research events around 1952 and the Sinai campaign when Israeli troops led by Moshe Dayan brutalized thousands of Arab Palestinians. The research and artwork is meticulous, and there are interesting interludes of present day destruction of Palestinian homes.
China (Cambridge Illustrated History) - Patricia Ebrey
After travelling briefly to China on a work trip in 2010, I decided I need to learn more about Chinese history. This is a vast topic, so even a fair size book like this has to skip over things quickly, but I found it adequate for my purpose. The pictures are also interesting and stop it getting too dry. There's another book in this series about the Islamic world that I hope to read soon.
The Outsider - Albert Camus
I found this interesting, but I'm not sure I fully appreciated some of the deeper meanings in it. I think I'll have to go back and read it again one day. One thing that I thought it might be trying to say is to be detached from one's decisions. Just act as one thinks is best and accept the result without worry. Did I read this book because I feel like an outsider? Am I hoping to have greater confidence to act according to my conscience without regret? I didn't really identify with the protagonist, so I'm not sure it worked. Or maybe it did. This book might sit in the backburner of my mind for a while before I properly understand it.
Life in the Freezer (A Natural History of the Antarctic) - Alastair Fothergill
I'm continuing my efforts to watch and read all of David Attenborough's TV series and books. This is not a major series in that there are only 6 episodes, but given the expense and difficulty of filming in Antarctica, maybe this can be understood. The narration and presentation of the series was by Attenborough, but this book is written by Fothergill, who has produced a number of Attenborough's series. Both series and book are excellent and a great introduction to the natural history of Antarctica. Fascinating learning about crabeater seals, weddell seals, many varieties of penguins, squaws, extreme weather etc etc.
Buddha - Karen Armstrong
Armstrong is a great sympathetic writer about religion. Even as an atheist I enjoy her writing because I feel religion and spirituality are important aspects of humanity that need to be properly, objectively understood, in their cultural and historical dimensions. In this book she outlines the historical buddha's life as best possible. This is a difficult task as most Buddhist scriptures date many centuries after Buddha's lifetime. Nevertheless it is these writings that form the core of Buddhist thought so it's probably irrelevant whether the stories are historically accurate. That's the story that Buddhists believe and that's what Armstrong is trying to relate here.
Rich Dad's Conspiracy of the Rich (The 8 New Rules of Money) - Robert T Kiyosaki
This could well be the worst book I have ever read. It was lent to me by a well-meaning colleague and I would feel guilty returning it without reading it, so I read it by skimming about half. I suppose you would call this a self-help book, a genre I have never been interested in, and it's about how to get rich. Well, if getting rich really motivated me, then I guess I wouldn't have become a teacher. This book is repetitive and dull. Kiyosaki constantly refers to his other books either assuming you have read them, or to spruik you to buy them. He is always going on about his 'rich dad' and 'poor dad' (the title and subject of his original bestseller) but never explains who they were. The only part I found remotely interesting was the part about the history of money from the time of barter to when Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, but I already knew most of it and I could easily get a more informative version from 5 minutes of reading Wikipedia. He also shows his trademark diagrams many times, such as one that puts people into 4 categories. The only benefit the diagram has as far as I can see, is that it allows him to refer to employees as those in 'quadrant E'. He also rails against the education system, socialism, and Democrats for their high taxes, without specifically attacking Obama (probably because people who read books, even ones as bad as this, are more likely to admire him).
To summarise his main thesis, to get rich you need to borrow big and use the money to buy investment properties and shares. Also buy some gold and silver. The advice is so generic as to be useless. But my biggest beef is that the book claims to diagnose the main problem of society in that there is a conspiracy of the rich and powerful to keep the rest of us poor, but his only solution is for his readers to participate in that same conspiracy to get rich too. There's no attempt to outline an alternative vision for society. And in fact, given that he proposes that his readers become like him, and end up with 1500 investment properties which he boasts about, this would mean that for every Kiyosaki, there would need to be 1500 poor people stuck paying rent to the rich guy. So it ultimately amounts to hyper-capitalist inequality. But if you don't have the money to get started, just buy my board game, CASHFLOW, which is like monopoly on steroids. Awful.
The Life You Can Save - Peter Singer
Singer's latest book about the ethics of giving and donations. This is short and breezy for an ethics book. I agree with Singer that most of us in rich western countries have an ethical obligation to help the poor. It's just that I don't think asking people to donate on an individual basis will ever be enough to eliminate poverty. In prisoner's dilemmas terms, it's too easy to defect. Far more significant in gathering large sums of money for charitable redistribution is this thing we have called government and progressive taxation. We just don't think of it as charity because it is compulsory. It has the benefit also of being democratic, at least in principle. The problem of course though is that it is not generous and progressive enough. How to fix it? Vote for someone or some party that will. And since no major parties are proposing anything near enough to fix the problem (e.g. neither Labor or Liberal in Australia propose any more than 1% of GDP as foreign aid), then that means voting further to the left, eg Greens, Socialists, or other groups supporting more revolutionary change.
The fact that these third parties don't come to power is unfortunate, sure, but if I support those parties through my democratically allowed means (voting, speaking out etc), then it's no longer my ethical problem, it's the ethical problem of the majority who don't support that level of change.
Super Cooperators (Evolution, altruism and human behaviour) - Martin Nowak
Nowak is a mathematical biologist working on problems around selfishness, cooperation and evolution. Thinkers mentioned in this book include Kropotkin(!), Russell, Hamilton, Haldane, E.O. Wilson, Pinker, Dawkins, Axelrod and Trivers. As an extension of Dawkin's gene centred theories, Nowak considers situations in nature and connected mathematical models where cooperation and altruism might arise naturally.
This is just a popular exposition, so there's not much mathematics in it really. For more mathematical background I would recommend Prisoner's Dilemma by Poundstone. Anyway, Nowak outlines precise conditions in a variety of contexts where cooperators succeed and defectors are kept at bay. I get the impression this is really solid work and an important extension of the selfish gene concept. I'm not sure what Dawkins would make of it, but I guess that in the future it will become part of the standard view.
My speculation: if in some environmental niche, the conditions favor defectors more, and in a different niche conditions favor cooperators (perhaps of a different species), what will happen? Would the cooperators impinge on the defectors? Or would they be more likely to spread into new niches and hence spread more overall? Are cooperators able to extract more free energy from the environment than defectors on average and hence be more biologically successful?
Words from the Vietnam years: An Australian Experience - Alan Ashbolt
This book was loaned to me by a colleague and I enjoyed it. Ashbolt is probably most famous as the producer of ABC's Four Corners (Australian public television current affairs) program in the 60's, in particular one episode partly critical of the RSL. Ashbolt recounts his political awakening growing up in Australia. There are amusing stories about public meetings in Gordon, on Sydney's North Shore, not an area terribly renowned for progressive politics and the anti-war movement in the Vietnam era.
p2500
