Books

Feeding frenzy – The new politics of food

By Paul McMahon Profile Books Agriculture seldom makes headlines and when it does, it struggles to sustain its high profile. It is easy to forget that all development is founded on agriculture and the success of nations depends on food security: as Paul McMahon writes in Feeding frenzy, there would have been no pyramids without full granaries. Yet despite clear signs that global food production and distribution is teetering on the edge of crisis, attention is directed to other priorities. McMahon sets the scene with a review of the history of the global food system and the underlying causes of the recent turmoil in food markets. Much of this will be familiar ground for New Agriculturist readers but worth reading for the lively if astringent analysis. He concludes that the world could feed 8 billion or more without awaiting silver bullets from genetic modification and miracle seeds. It’s just that: “So far we have spectacularly failed to construct a just global food system – this is why one in eight people go hungry while one in five is overweight.” McMahon has travelled widely and authored major reports on sustainable food systems for the FAO. He is also an advisor to The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit. He believes that sub-Saharan Africa is Ground Zero for many of the food production challenges discussed in this book but goes on to write, “Sub-Saharan Africa has enormous potential to increase production with more than 750 million hectares of suitable land that could be brought into production and the potential to triple yields.” The author is convinced that the answer lies in two major themes: “The first is the need to help small farmers in poor countries produce more food. The second theme is the importance of switching to agro-ecological farming systems that […]

The Lexus and the Olive Tree

By Thomas L Friedman $22.99 Harper Collins As the Foreign Affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman has travelled to the four corners of the globe, interviewing people from all walks of contemporary life – Brazilian peasants in the Amazon rain forest, new entrepreneurs in Indonesia, Islamic students in Teheran, and the financial wizards on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Now Friedman has drawn on his years on the road to produce an engrossing and original look at the new international system that, more than anything else, is shaping world affairs today: globalisation. His argument can be summarised quite simply. Globalisation is not just a phenomenon and not just a passing trend. It is the international system that replaced the Cold War system. Globalisation is the integration of capital, technology, and information across national borders, in a way that is creating a single global market and, to some degree, a global village. You cannot understand the morning news or know where to invest your money or think about where the world is going unless you understand this new system, which is influencing the domestic policies and international relations of virtually every country in the world today. And once you do understand the world as Friedman explains it, you’ll never look at it quite the same way again. With vivid stories and a set of original terms and concepts, Friedman shows us how to see this new system. He dramatises the conflict of “the Lexus and the olive tree” – the tension between the globalisation system and ancient forces of culture, geography, tradition, and community. He also details the powerful backlash that globalisation produces among those who feel brutalised by it, and he spells out what we all need to do to keep this system in balance. […]

My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist

By Sadanand Dhume Text Publishing RRP $AUS34.95 In October 2002, Sadanand Dhume found himself in a place most foreigners were trying to flee Bali. Powerful explosions the previous night had ripped through two tourist nightclubs, killing more than two hundred people. That evening he visited what remained of the Sari Club. Standing among piles of ash and blackened beer bottles, he wondered about the future of a country long regarded as immune to such carnage. My Friend the Fanatic is a fascinating portrait of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, painted through the travels of a pair of unlikely protagonists. Dhume is a foreign correspondent, an Ivy League-educated Indian with a fondness for John Updike and an interest in economic development. His companion, Herry Nurdi, is a young Islamist who hero-worships Osama bin Laden. Does Herry represent the future for Indonesia? By turns disturbing and funny, My Friend the Fanatic fulfills a deep hunger for knowledge about our largest neighbour in a time of dynamic and unpredictable change. Sadanand Dhume is a Washington-based journalist and writer. As a former Indonesia correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal Asia in Jakarta, Sadanand covered Indonesia’s economics, politics and society.

Anna Karenina

The book doesn’t drag, except when it kind of needs to in order to accentuate the monotony and meaninglessness of Anna’s life. They say that you should write what you know. Plenty of books include references to their authors’ real life experiences. This is certainly the case for Anna Karenina. The book actually follows two characters whose lives are loosely connected. The titular character, Anna Karenina, is married to a statesman, Alexei Karenin, and they have a young son, Seryozha. She has everything she could possibly want – or so she thinks until she meets the young, dashing Count Vronsky. The second storyline follows Konstantin Levin, whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. Levin wants nothing more than a simple country living and a family to share it with, but the girl he loves, Kitty, has refused him because Vronsky has been flirting with her. Anna-s brother, Stepan, is married to Kitty-s older sister, Darya. The book begins with a crisis in Stepan-s marriage: he’s been unfaithful to Darya. Ironically, Anna is the one who convinced Darya to forgive Stepan. Shortly thereafter, she meets Vronsky and carries out a flirtation with him that ends in adultery. At first, Anna’s affair is about her infatuation with Vronsky and his near-worship of her. But after Karenin discovers their affair, she chooses to run away with Vronsky, and a destructive chain of events is set in motion. In the meantime, Levin withdraws to his country estate to lick his wounds after Kitty rejects him. During his time there, he comes to truly appreciate the peace of pastoral living. Tolstoy said that Anna Karenina was about family, and the contrast between the Karenins and the Levins shows two vastly different family lives: the idyllic, pastoral happiness of the Levins and the languid, corrosive misery of […]

The Science of Love: How Positivity Resonance Shapes the Way We Connect

by Maria Popova The neurobiology of how the warmest emotion blurs the boundaries by you and not-you. A timeless as their words might be, the poets and the philosophers have a way of escaping into the comfortable detachment of the abstract and the metaphysical, leaving open the ‘question’of what love really is on an unglamorously physical, bodily, neurobiological level – and how that might shape our experience of those lofty abstractions. That’s precisely what psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, who has been studying positive emotions for decades, explores in the unfortunately titled but otherwise excellent Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become (UK;public library). Using both ‘data’from her own lab and ample citations of other studies, Fredrickson dissects the mechanisms of love to reveal both its mythologies and its practical mechanics. She begins with a definition that parallels Dorion Sagan’s scientific meditation on sex:First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force. As for all positive emotions, the inner feeling love brings you is inherently and exquisitely pleasant – it feels extraordinarily good, the way a long, cool drink of water feels when you’re parched on a hot day. Yet far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you – what lies beyond your skin – relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others- really’see’ them, wholeheartedly springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of […]

Chinese writer Mo Yan laughs as he holds a cigarette during the International Strindberg Conference in Beijing

Mo Yan wins Nobel prize for literature

Mo Yan become the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel prize for literature, a decision that sparked rejoicing but some criticism in his homeland. State media celebrated Mo’s win and the Nobel website rapidly filled with comments from Chinese users expressing pride at his triumph. The Swedish Academy, which decides on the award, said the novelist’s “hallucinatory realism” merged folk tales, history and the contemporary, and created a world reminiscent of those forged by William Faulkner and Gabriel Garc’a M‡rquez. “He writes about the peasantry, about life in the countryside, about people struggling to survive, struggling for their dignity, sometimes winning but most of the time losing,” said the academy’s secretary, Peter Englund. The 57-year-old author’s real name is Guan Moye but he took his pen name, which translates as “don’t speak”, to remind him of the dangers of saying too much. “His work is always unique. Since Red Sorghum, he has for the past 30 years consistently been at a peak of creativity. That is not easy. Many writers have ups and downs, but he keeps himself at his writing peak,” Yan Lianke, another highly regarded novelist, said. He added that the award was a recognition of Chinese literature. This was a widespread feeling in China, where, according to Beijing-based literary translator Brendan O’Kane, writers feel Chinese literature is not comprehensible to the rest of the world. “This will be a huge confidence boost,” he said. The only other Chinese winner was Gao Xingjian, who took the 2000 prize, but he lives in exile as a French citizen and his works are banned on the mainland. The Chinese foreign ministry complained at the time that the prize had “been used for ulterior political motives” though Mo praised Gao’s “enormous contribution” to Chinese literature. This time, the national broadcaster […]

My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist

By Sadanand Dhume Text Publishing RRP $AUS34.95 In October 2002, Sadanand Dhume found himself in a place most foreigners were trying to flee Bali. Powerful explosions the previous night had ripped through two tourist nightclubs, killing more than two hundred people. That evening he visited what remained of the Sari Club. Standing among piles of ash and blackened beer bottles, he wondered about the future of a country long regarded as immune to such carnage. My Friend the Fanatic is a fascinating portrait of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, painted through the travels of a pair of unlikely protagonists. Dhume is a foreign correspondent, an Ivy League-educated Indian with a fondness for John Updike and an interest in economic development. His companion, Herry Nurdi, is a young Islamist who hero-worships Osama bin Laden. Does Herry represent the future for Indonesia? By turns disturbing and funny. My Friend the Fanatic fulfills a deep hunger for knowledge about our largest neighbour in a time of dynamic and unpredictable change. Sadanand Dhume is a Washington-based journalist and writer. As a former Indonesia correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal Asia in Jakarta, Sadanand covered IndonesiaÕs economics, politics and society.

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President

By Ron Suskind, Harper Collins, $ 24.99 The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single, powerful, quintessentially American concept: confidence. Both centres of power, tapping brazen innovations over the past three decades, learned how to manufacture it. Until August 2007, when that confidence finally began to crumble. In this brilliantly reported book, Ron Suskind tells the story of what happened next, as Wall Street struggled to save itself while a man with little experience and soaring rhetoric emerged from obscurity to usher in ‘a new era of responsibility’. It is a story that follows the journey of Barack Obama, who rose as the country fell, and offers the first full portrait of his tumultuous presidency. Wall Street found that straying from long-standing principles of transparency, accountability, and fair dealing opened a path to stunning profits. Obama’s determination to reverse that trend was essential to his ascendance, especially when Wall Street collapsed during the fall of an election year and the two candidates could audition for the presidency by responding to a national crisis. Based on hundreds of interviews and filled with piercing insights and startling disclosures, CONFIDENCE MEN brings into focus the collusion and conflict between New York and Washington, one of private gain, the other of public purpose, in defining confidence and, thereby, charting America’s future. Ron Suskind is the author of the New York Times bestsellers THE WAY OF THE WORLD, ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE, THE PRICE OF LOYALTY and A HOPE IN THE UNSEEN. From 1993 to 2000 he was the senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafon Text Publishing This edition of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s much-loved bestseller includes Chapter One of his new literary sensation The Angel’s Game. It is 1945 and Barcelona is enduring the long aftermath of civil war when Daniel Sempere’s bookseller father decides his son is old enough to visit the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books. There Daniel must ‘adopt’ a single book, promising to care for it and keep it alive always. His choice falls on The Shadow of the Wind. Bewitched, he embarks on an epic quest to find the truth about Julian Carax, the bookÕs mysterious author. Soon Daniel is consumed by strange discoveries about love and obsession, art and life, and how they become entangled within the shadow world of books. The Shadow of the Wind is a mesmerising love story and literary thriller, which twists and turns and enthralls with its cast of vengeful souls, threatening spectres and innocent hearts.

Joseph Anton

By Salman Rushdie RRP $39.99 Random House On 14 February 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been ‘sentenced to death’ by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being ‘against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran’. So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov – Joseph Anton. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for over nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom. It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.

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