Museveni on Qaddafi
Museveni writes a nuanced article on Qaddafi in Foreign Policy. I agree with Chris Blattman’s analysis.
Category Archives: Reviews
Fiction as a route to political truth
From Gideon Rachman’s latest FT column: A novel that made me rethink some of my assumptions about modern India was Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Like many foreign journalists I was attached to a few clichés about the country: booming economy, world’s largest democracy, fine tradition of the rule of law. Mr Adiga’s book reveals… Read More »
On the New World Disorder
Alan Beattie, the FT’s international economy editor, reviews three books on the New World (dis)Order. The books: The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Limits of Nations and the Pursuit of a New Politics, by Mark Malloch Brown, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 272 pages How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, by Parag… Read More »
On the conservativeness of the Oscars
Nicholas Barber at The Economist’s Prospero blog: No one would begrudge Colin Firth his Best Actor trophy: as well as putting in a tremendous performance in the film, his acceptance speeches are, time and time again, so gracious and fluent that all future nominees should be sent DVDs of them to study. But the choice… Read More »
A review of Teju Cole’s Open City
In The New Yorker: The narrator of “Open City,” Julius, is in his final year of a psychiatry fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian, and the book covers roughly a year, between the fall of 2006 and the late summer of 2007. He is around thirty, and tells us that he came to America as a university… Read More »
An impressive bio of Dambisa Moyo
… in Newsweek. Which undermines the argument that one should pay attention to the message and not the messenger. As if the two could ever really be separated.
The Economist rips Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost apart
HERE are two predictions about the world economy. First, the West’s malaise and the rise of emerging economies will yield a mountain of books. Second, few of these are likely to be as bad as “How the West Was Lost”. Here.
How much does technological development owe to pornography?
A lot, argues journalist Patchen Barss, who has just published a book titled The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google. From the publishers’ website: From cave painting to photography to the internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication.… Read More »
Reviews of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book
From The Economist: For anyone who has ever felt a tinge of rose-tinted nostalgia for the traditional, Ayaan Hirsi Ali provides a bracing, and on the whole healthy, cold shower. Having experienced traditional society from the inside—in the form of a Muslim Somali family headed by a well-known politician who practised polygamy and left a… Read More »
My take on *Welcome to Lagos*
Some Nigerians are complaining about the BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos because, they say, it is not balanced. I have not seen the second in the series so I can’t really say much about that. The first, though, in my opinion, does not leave any gap that needs to be filled by any fair and… Read More »