Books

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.

Rupert Murdoch: Investigation of Power

By David McKnight Allen & Unwin Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch’s commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using News Corp as his vehicle. David McKnight uncovers Murdoch’s crusade for his unique brand of conservatism over three decades. Drawing on extensive original research, McKnight tracks NewsCorp’s pursuit of conservative ideas, from Reagan and Thatcher to the Tea Party and its war on Barack Obama. He shows how Murdoch’s political connections underpinned the scandal of phone hacking in Britain and thwarted investigation. He examines the secretive corporate culture of News Corporation: its private political seminars for editors, its sponsorship of think tanks and its recurring editorial campaigns around the world. Its success is reflected in the fact that the campaigns are familiar to us all: small government and market deregulation, skepticism on climate change, support for neo-conservative adventures such as Iraq and relentless criticism of all things liberal. For all its power and influence, News Corporation is now in a profound crisis. The mobile phone hacking scandal has irreparably tarnished its reputation. Its ability to use its news media to bully politicians may be fatally weakened. In the longer term its confident free market ideology is no longer the orthodoxy since the arrival of Obama and the global financial crisis. His unwavering support for the invasion of Iraq has backfired and his flip-flopping on climate change has discredited him. News Corporation faces an uncertain future as digital technology eats into his newspaper empire which has been the basis of Murdoch’s political power.

Finance and the Good Society

By Robert J Shiller Princeton University Press $Aus 37.95 $NZ 46.91 The reputation of the financial industry could hardly be worse than it is today in the painful aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. New York Times best-selling economist Robert Shiller is no apologist for the sins of finance–he is probably the only person to have predicted both the stock market bubble of 2000 and the real estate bubble that led up to the subprime mortgage meltdown. But in this important and timely book, Shiller argues that, rather than condemning finance, we need to reclaim it for the common good. He makes a powerful case for recognising that finance, far from being a parasite on society, is one of the most powerful tools we have for solving our common problems and increasing the general well-being. We need more financial innovation–not less–and finance should play a larger role in helping society achieve its goals. Challenging the public and its leaders to rethink finance and its role in society, Shiller argues that finance should be defined not merely as the manipulation of money or the management of risk but as the stewardship of society’s assets. He explains how people in financial careers–from CEO, investment manager, and banker to insurer, lawyer, and regulator–can and do manage, protect, and increase these assets. He describes how finance has historically contributed to the good of society through inventions such as insurance, mortgages, savings accounts, and pensions, and argues that we need to envision new ways to rechannel financial creativity to benefit society as a whole. Ultimately, Shiller shows how society can once again harness the power of finance for the greater good.

Burden of Power, The Countdown to Iraq

Alastair Campbell Random House $62.99 The Burden of Power is the fourth volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries, and perhaps the most eagerly awaited given the ground it covers. It begins on September 12, 2001 as world leaders assess their response to Al Qaida terrorist attacks in New York and Washington the day before, a day which wrote itself immediately into the history books: 9/11, and it ends on the day Campbell leaves Downing Street. In between there are two wars, first Afghanistan, still going on today, and then, even more controversially, Iraq. It was the most difficult decision of Blair’s premiership, and perhaps the most unpopular. Campbell describes in detail the discussions with President Bush and other world leaders as the steps to war are taken, and delivers an intimate account of Blair as war leader. He records the enormous political difficulties at home, and the sense of crisis that engulfed the government over the suicide of weapons inspector David Kelly. And in the meantime Blair continues to struggle with two issues that have run through all of the Campbell diaries in government – fighting for peace in Northern Ireland, and trying to make peace with Gordon Brown. And Campbell continues to struggle with trying to balance one of the most pressurised posts in politics with the needs of a family and a partner who wants him to leave it. The Burden of Power is as raw and intimate a portrayal of the pressures and responsibilities of political life as you are ever likely to read.

Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific

By Tim Flannery Text Publishing Twenty-five years ago, a young curator of mammals from the Australian Museum in Sydney set out to research the fauna of the Pacific Islands. Starting with a survey of one of the most inaccessible islands in Melanesia – Woodlark, in the Trobriands Group that the young scientist found himself ghost-whispering, snake wrestling, Quadoi hunting and plunged waist-deep into a sludge of maggot-infested faeces in search of a small bat that turned out not to be earth-shatteringly interesting.With accounts of discovering, naming and sometimes eating new mammal species; being thwarted or aided by local customs; and historic scientific expeditions, Tim Flannery takes us on an enthralling journey through some of the most diverse and spectacular environments on earth. Among the Islandsis the third book in a loose trilogy of Flannery’s adventures, following on fromThrowim Way Leg and Country.

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