Sorry, read this one many years back and loved, loved, loved it. But it was long enough ago that I do not feel confident enough in my collander-strengSorry, read this one many years back and loved, loved, loved it. But it was long enough ago that I do not feel confident enough in my collander-strength memory to post an actual review. ...more
When late-twenty-something Conor Grennan felt guilty about spending an entire year travelling the world, he decided to dedicate three months of this tWhen late-twenty-something Conor Grennan felt guilty about spending an entire year travelling the world, he decided to dedicate three months of this time to volunteering at a Kathmandu orphanage named “Little Princes.” His experience would be a life altering one for him. The children in this orphanage had arrived mostly because of traffickers. Unscrupulous men promise desperately poor rural parents that their children will be well looked-after, well educated, and will be safe from being taken by Maoist insurgents. They then charge these poor people enormous sums but do not deliver on their promises. Some of the children are sold into slavery, some are used as professional beggars for Fagin-like masters, some are dumped on families no better able to raise and protect them than their own families, and some are dropped off at orphanages. The “orphans” Grennan encountered were often children who still had living families. He made it his mission to try to reconnect the children with their loved ones.
I was reminded of Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson’s tale of building schools for education-deprived kids in Pakistan. There is plenty of observation of the surrounding physical and political environment, but Grennan’s tale hews more closely than Mortenson’s to his personal story, and so far as we know, to the truth.
In fact, it reads like a novel, with a bit of something for everyone. There is suspense. Grennan must fear for his life as Dickensian evil-doers, such as politically connected human traffickers and Maoist rebels who do not appreciate his interefence with their theft of children, pose a constant threat. There is adventure, as Grennan, who is injured at the beginning of the journey, and a team, trek the Himalayas trying desperately to find the families of his lost children before winter sets in. There is a tale of moral uplift as this young middle-class westerner finds a calling to help children in need in a remote, impoverished land. This is accompanied by an understated exploration of spirituality. But most of all, this is a love story. For it is his love for the children he encounters that sets Grennan on his life's new path, love for the corps of new friends with whom he shares his work and finally, love for a woman he meets via e-mail while he is in Nepal, a woman he believes will be the love of his life. (I always enjoy hearing of people who have met this way, having met my wife-of-twelve-years on-line myself) He describes their impending meeting: "man walks twenty-seven hours in two days to get out of the mountains to meet girl who has just flown nine thousand miles for a visit." Not your typical first date.
At times, I was racing through the pages as if I were reading a Stieg Larsson, eager to see what happens next, and at others, I had to put the book down to wipe my eyes. You will be engaged, moved and uplifted. There really are good things happening in this world. There really are good people. And it is really good to be reminded of that.
I stumbled across a video re Grennan and the book. It is a promotional piece, but captures well what the book is about. There are more vids on Connor's site.
PS – The copy I read was an ARE, so lacked some items that I hope will make it into the production version. Maps would help situate one in the geography here, and I really wanted to see photos of the places and people Grennan writes about.
PPS - The author graciously posted a comment about this. Maps and photos were indeed in the hard cover.
This is one of those seminal books (to me at least) that has a lot to say about the nature of human relationships.
Quotes: p 36 - ...while there are vaThis is one of those seminal books (to me at least) that has a lot to say about the nature of human relationships.
Quotes: p 36 - ...while there are various reasons why it could make Darwinian sense for a woman to mate with more than one man (maybe the first man was infertile, for example) there comes a time when having more sex just isn't worth the trouble. Better to get some rest or grab a bite to eat. For a man, unless he's really on the brink of collapse or starvation, that time never comes. Each new partner offers a very real chance to get more genes into the next generation - a much more valuable prospect, in the Darwinian calculus, than a nap or a meal. As the evolutionary psychologists martin Daly and Margo Wilson have succinctly put it: for males "there is always the possibility of doing better."
There is a sense in which a female can do better too, but it has to do with quality, not quantity. Giving birth to a child involves a huge commitment of time, not to mention energy and nature has put a low ceiling on how many such enterprises she can undertake. So each child, from her (genetic) point of view, is an extremely precious gene machine. Its ability to survive and then, in turn, produce its own young gene machines is of mammoth importance. It makes Darwinian sense, then, for a woman to be selective about the man who is going to help her build each gene machine.
p 38 whatever the ancestral environment was like, it wasn't much like the environment we're in now. We aren't designed to stand on crowded subway platforms, or to live in suburbs next door to people we never talk to, or to get hired and fired, or to watch the evening news. This disjunction between the contexts of our design and our lives is probably responsible for much psychopathology, as well as much suffering of a less dramatic sort.
“Why you white men have so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization] and we New Guineans have so little?”
Jared Diamond is
“Why you white men have so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization] and we New Guineans have so little?”
Jared Diamond is a biologist, who had a passion for studying birds, particularly the birds of New Guinea. But as he came to know and appreciate the many native people he met in his work, the question asked by a New Guinean named Yani remained with him. Why was it that westerners had so much relative to New Guinean natives, who had been living on that land for forty thousand years. Many found an explanation in racial exceptionalism. Diamond decided to find out. Was one group of people smarter than another? Why was there such dimorphism in the amount of cargo produced and toted by different groups?
The arguments he seeks to counter are those stating that since "civilization" came to full flower in the Eurasian countries and not in places where other races dominated, that this success indicated innate superiority. He offers a stunning analysis of why civilization emerged in the places in which it did.
[image] Jared Diamond – image from The Guardian
Guns figure large in why some societies were able dominate others, but the development of guns was not a universal. The materials necessary are not equally distributed over the planet, and there are technological prerequisites.
It turns out that not every locale is ideal for the emergence of farming. He offers some detail on why farming flourished in some areas more than in others. The importance of domesticated animals is considered. Diamond shows how it was possible for them to have been domesticated in some, but not all of the theoretically possible locations. He discusses the impact of germs, the immunity defense developed by more urban dwellers, and the harm those germs can cause when those urban dwellers come into contact with peoples who lack such immunities. Although "Steel" figures prominently in the title, and is significant in its use in weaponry, this aspect is given the lightest treatment in the book. Diamond closes with a plea for history to be redefined as History Science, claiming that, as with many other "historical" sciences, it holds the elements necessary to merit the "science" designation.
While I might have been happier if the title had been Guns, Germs, and Seeds, it remains a seminal look at the whys and wherefores of how some societies came to flourish, often at the expense of others. It has nothing to do with genes. Guns, Germs and Steel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
This is probably the definitive work on the history of US involvement in the Afghanistan war against the Soviets and the resulting blowback.
Coll beginThis is probably the definitive work on the history of US involvement in the Afghanistan war against the Soviets and the resulting blowback.
Coll begins with the Islamabad riot of 1979, in which thousands of Islamic militants laid waste to the US embassy while Zia was riding about on a bicycle distributing unrelated leaflets, and accompanied by much of his military. Did he know about the plan and make himself deliberately unavailable? It is clear that he had an agenda of his own in dealing with the USA. Fearful of India to his south and the USSR to his north he was eager to keep the Russians at bay, using Afghanistan as a buffer state. He was also beset from within politically, so made a decision that might seem right at home in Saudi Arabia, he enabled the fundamentalists. He was also eager to keep the Pashtuns who straddled the Afghani-Pakistani border from becoming too powerful, and forming their own country. Thus, aid to Afghanistan resistance fighters was focused on non-Pashtun players.
Channeling all aid through the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, the primary intel entity in the country, the tail that wags the Pakistani dog. There are significant numbers of Taliban sympathizers within the organization.) meant that the USA was allowing that extremist entity to affect the future in all Central Asia, fomenting fundamentalist Islam throughout the region. Coll offers accounts of William Casey sponsoring actions that were well beyond his authority, and that risked conflagration, such as sponsoring incursions by the Islamists into the Soviet Union.
When the USA denied aid to Pakistan because of the nuclear bomb issue, Saudi Arabia stepped in and kept the money flowing, increasing their influence and the power of the ISI.
Ahmed Massoud was not a Pashtun, but a Tajik, hailing from the northeast of Afghanistan, the Panjshir Valley. He was not only a gifted strategist, but a politician as well. While fighting the Russians for years he was also bargaining with them, finally achieving a cease fire, to the chagrin of the other resistance leaders, most notably Hekmatyar, who regarded him as a Benedict Arnold for dealing with the enemy.
The role of the UNOCAL deal – the US wanted to provide a way for Central Asian republics to get their oil and gas to market without it having to go through Russia. Also Pakistan had an interest in buying petro from them. They needed a stable, unified regime in Afghanistan in order to make it possible to build a pipeline there.
Coll looks at the responses of four US administrations regarding Afghanistan, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush jr. He looks at the complications of governing this multi-ethnic society and how external politics affected its existence. Soviet pressure, Pakistan desire to use Afghanistan as a buffer state, the US wanting to pursue bin Laden, Saudi Arabia looking to spread Islam and contain Iran. He looks at some of the religious differences, noting that the Taliban was decidedly Sunni, despite Condeleeza’s mistaken notion that they were one with Iran.
This is a masterwork, covering a lot, A LOT of territory. If you have any interest in events in the Stans, in the Indian subcontinent or in US foreign policy, this is an absolute must read.
P 104 Drawing on his experiences running dissident Polish exiles as agents behind Nazi lines, [CIA chief William] Casey decided to revive the CIA’s propaganda proposals targeting Central Asia. The CIA’ specialists proposed to send in books about Central Asian culture and historical Soviet atrocities in the region. The ISI’s generals said they would prefer to ship Korans in the local languages…the CIA printed thousands of copies of the Muslim book and shipped them to Pakistan for distribution to the Mujahidin
P 132 [As part of their tactics, Afghani insurgents targeted Russians in Kabul] Fear of poisoning, surprise attacks, and assassination became rife among Russian officers and soldiers in Kabul. The rebels fashioned booby-trapped bombs from gooey black contact explosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or poured into innocent utensils. Russian soldiers began to find bombs made from pens, watches, cigarette lighters, and tape recorders…Kabul shopkeepers poisoned food eaten by Russian soldiers.
P 134 Afghans…uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.
It is clear that there is a very real divide within Pakistan between the civilian leadership and the military. The latter is vastly influenced by Islamic extremists. Because the CIA was not interested in delving into local politics, they allowed the ISI to control the funds we were providing. This was not the same as allowing the Paki government to control it. Their interests were not identical.
There also developed a divergence between the focus of the CIA and the State department. CIA was wedded to the ISI, whereas State, particularly via reports by dissidents (Edmund McWilliams, Peter Tomsen) sent back through channels that bypassed the CIA, became more inclined to attempt to achieve some sort of rapprochement among the elements. ISI had favorites and was channeling resources to them. Those resources were turned on other mujahidin. Hekmatyar, for example, tried to wipe out all his opposition, and did a pretty good number on Massoud’s officer corps.
P 165 [In 1987] The CIA did not account for the massive weight of private Saudi and Arab funding that tilted the field (of anti-soviets) toward the Islamists—up to $25 milion a month by Bearden’s own estimate. Nor did they account for the intimate tactical and strategic partnerships between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Islamists, expecially along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. By the late 1908s ISI had effectively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and royalist political parties that had first formed when Afghan refugees fled communist rule.
P 168 A year before they left Afghanistan, the Soviet informed the US that they would be leaving [George’ Shultz was so struck by the significance of the news that it half-panicked him. He feared that if he told the right-wingers in Reagan’s cabinet that Shevardnaze had said, and endorsed the disclosure as sincere, he would be accused of going soft on Moscow. He kept the conversation to himself for weeks.
Shevardnaze had asked for American cooperation in limiting the spread of “Islamic fundamentalism.” Schultz was sympathetic, but no high-level Reagan administration officials ever gave much thought to the issue…the warnings were just a way to deflect attention from Soviet failings, American hard-liners decided.
P 475 [for Pakistan] The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb. ...more
Jean-Dominique Baube, the forty-something editor of Elle magazine in Paris, husband, father, was stricken by a rare brain disease. After several weeksJean-Dominique Baube, the forty-something editor of Elle magazine in Paris, husband, father, was stricken by a rare brain disease. After several weeks in a coma he awoke to find that he was a prisoner inside his own body, with control over only his left eye, and motion limited to twisting his head left and right, somewhat. Yet this man managed, with help, to not only maintain his sanity and his optimism, but his appreciation of beauty and his sense of humor. This is a case in which imagination is a critical tool to one’s very survival. The guy wrote a book using little more than his left eye blinking code to an interpreter. This is not at all a depressing memoir. It is inspiring. In fact it is one of the most positive, uplifting things I have ever read. ...more
This is one of the great ones. Capote blankets Holcomb, Kansas with his curiosity. The root of this wor[image] Truman Capote - image from the NY Post
This is one of the great ones. Capote blankets Holcomb, Kansas with his curiosity. The root of this work is a ghastly crime. Two recently released convicts, seeking a fortune that did not exist, invade the Clutter family home, tie up the four family members present and leave no witnesses. It takes some time for the perpetrators to be identified, then tracked down. Capote looks at how the townspeople react to this. Many, fearful that one of their own was responsible, become withdrawn. How do people mourn? He looks at the sequence of investigation that leads ultimately to the capture of the suspects, focusing on one of the chief investigators. He looks in depth at the criminals. What makes them tick? How could people do such awful things? In reading this I was reminded of some of the great panoramic art works of a bygone age, works by Bosch, or Breughel, in which entire towns were brought together into one wide-screen image. This is what Capote has done. But even with all the territory he covers there is considerable depth. I was also reminded, for an entirely different reason of Thomas Hardy. Capote has an incredible gift for language. He writes beautifully, offering descriptions that can bring to tears anyone who truly loves language. It has the power of poetry. This is truly a classic, a book that defined a new genre of literature. If you haven’t read it, you must.
[image] Murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith - image from ABC Australia
This is a major work. Diamond looks in detail at the factors at play in the demise of civilizations in human history, using a wide range of examples. This is a major work. Diamond looks in detail at the factors at play in the demise of civilizations in human history, using a wide range of examples. He offers a framework in which to structure the analysis and looks in great detail at possible (and in many cases certain) reasons why various societies collapsed. He is not a one-note analyst. All problems do not fit the same mold. There is considerable nuance and common sense brought to bear on this examination. Foolishness plays a part, greed, corruption. But just as frequently, the actors behave rationally. Maybe they were unaware or could not possibly be aware of the larger implications of their actions. Maybe the land in which they lived was ill-suited to large numbers of humans. Maybe changes in climate made what seemed a reasonable place a death trap. Clearly an analysis of why societies failed in the past, with particular attention to environmental issues, has direct relevance to our world today. For example, Polynesian islands that were dependant on resources from other islands collapsed when their import supply dried up. That has relevance to oil-dependant first world nations today, for example. Diamond goes out of his way to make a case that business is business and they are not in the business of performing charity or taking responsibility for the common weal. He does point out that some businesses have been instrumental in forcing improvements in producers. He cited Home Depot and BP among others, although I expect he might have second thoughts about the latter's net impact.
I found the book to be extremely eye-opening and informative. It was a long, slow read, but well worth the effort. It makes my short list of must read for anyone seriously interested in current affairs. ...more
This was a very illuminating work about how chaotic situations are used, and sometimes created, as cover for the imposition of drastic economic and po This was a very illuminating work about how chaotic situations are used, and sometimes created, as cover for the imposition of drastic economic and political reorganization in vulnerable economies. The end product of these actions is a so-called free market model as advocated by the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and his acolytes. Examples used include Chile, China, Argentina, Bolivia, South Africa, Russia, among others. The technique is for western financial powers to swoop in during a time of financial crisis and refuse to lend a struggling nation any money until that nation agrees to a radical reworking of its economy. This reworking is done in a shock, with many changes instituted all at once, with little or no warning. These changes, as they are draconian toward the lower classes, usually need to be accompanied by severe political repression in order to enforce the transition. What we see here is the mechanism of a growing form of corporatist colonialism.
Klein parallels her examination of the stresses endured by many national economies with a look at actual, literal, personal shock treatment. In the 1950s a researcher named Ewan Cameron did research on his theory that instead of Freudian therapy a more effective method of treating mental illness was to erase the patient’s personality using electric shocks. Then the blank page would be receptive to reconstruction by the good doctor. The shocks caused amnesia and extreme regression. Cameron devised a new tool, one that applied six shocks at once, and even used a wide range of drugs to disorient and wipe clean as much of the patient’s personality as possible. Once the subject was reduced to a vegetative state, Cameron played them tapes dozens, maybe hundreds of times over. The CIA took note and launched a program of its own.
She posits a parallel between treatments that serve to erase personality with the economic and political shocks that struggling nations are forced to endure, shocks that are part and parcel of the move from a developmentalist economy, one that seeks local control and self-sufficiency, to a globalist economy, one in which foreign investment in and ownership of local enterprise is encouraged.
While I found that at times Klein extended her discourse beyond the reach of her material, her analysis of the subject matter is compelling, her linkage of different forms of shock (personal, political, economic) illuminating, and the applicability of her work to the current economic disruptions frightening. Despite its subject matter, this a compelling, and relatively fast read. It should be mandatory reading for anyone concerned with politics, economics, world affairs or current events.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
August 4, 2011 - the following article has particular relevance not only for the international implementation of TSD, but to its application within the USA. It is an interview with Dr. Michael Hudson, a guy who has been ahead of the curve for a long time on the roots of current economic atrocities.
June 18, 2012 - Joe Nocera's NY Times column on how ALEC-based programs are gutting democracy in Rhode Island ...more
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