I am a philosopher and writer, but I have equally been a soldier, designer, educator, and farmer. Thus, I am a product of this history. At the center of my gravity are concerns with environmental and climatic issues, conflict reduction, social justice, and political change predicated upon conditions of sustainability. I live in Australia but have worked in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. I have written over twenty books because I am driven to understand the complexity of the world in which I live. I am an activist, and so I strive to act affirmatively based on the knowledge I have gained.
This book examines the relations of the forces of change: enviro-climatically, geopolitically, ideologically, technologically, and their impacts in ways that…
This is an award-winning book that will take you somewhere you are unlikely to have been before. I recommend having been a soldier, as someone who directly and indirectly writes on war, and with the knowledge of it being a domain of human folly, enfolding extreme emotions extending from hate to love. It held me in its grip. It made the familiar unfamiliar in a way that invited self-reflection. While a translation, its command of language was evident
A driving force behind so many fiction writers is not just to tell a compelling story but to expose particular aspects of the human condition. Diop’s book does this very powerfully. He puts the tragedy of racism, the consequence of colonialism, and questions of masculinity directly before the reader with no option to look away, but with an implied command to look at your own views and values.
While set in World War One, an indivisible bond between humanity and inhumanity is revealed. In doing so, the book speaks as to the present and the future as much as it does to the past. I am a reader who does not just read for pleasure but equally to understand the worlds in which I dwell, see unfold, myself, and the present moment. On this score, the book delivers in plenty.
Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France's German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open.
Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comrades in arms. How far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
This book brings together fiction and a future that is being significantly formed by the impacts of climate change in a dialogue about freedom. I embraced this relation as an invitation to imagine. Ghosh makes a fundamental shift in contemporary life that starts to become evident.
As someone very interested in political thought (rather than party politics), it changed how I viewed freedom, a stated intent of the book. It moved my perceptions beyond familiar issues of emancipation from poverty and oppression across race, class, and gender to make clear a more basic dependence. There is no freedom without the environmental conditions and climate that make life possible. While obvious this dependence is understated.
From this position, the book laments the underdeveloped engagement of climate change by fiction, by a fiction writer. It cannot be understood just by the picture created by science. Ghosh shows this by creating a narrative that moves through stories, then history, to finally arrive at politics: the journey is very interesting. I found the book to be a refreshing and stimulating read.
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today's climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the…
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
This is a huge book—in size, as an object, and in number of pages (almost 1400). It's a book for people like me who enjoy exploring words, language, and ideas. It was created by over 160 distinguished scholars working in twelve languages and translated into English by five translators.
There are around four hundred words selected from many different fields. For me, it is a deep well into which to dip and draw out new insights and discoveries. It recognizes that words change in meaning in translation. This becomes very clear as a word is passed through different languages and familiar and unfamiliar usage over time, but often with an ethnocentric bias.
The book is far more nuanced than an ordinary dictionary, and its entries are more expansive—some are actually essays, some five or six pages long or more. Once I got to know it, I found it called me when I stumbled across a word that interested me in another work. It sits on my bookshelf waiting to be called. I like the quality of its character.
This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy--or any--translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage,…
Ailton Kranek is a well-known Indigenous Rights activist, environmental campaigner, activist, and journalist in and beyond Brazil. His modest seventy-three-page book looks at, and beyond, life in the Krenak village in Minas Gerais on the Doce River, in southeast Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon. What I so like about this book is it confronts the horror of the prospect of extinction without turning away to the present culture as a force of resistance.
The members of the Krenak nation call the river Watu—our grandfather—a person. His story, the story of his village, and of the river are one. Watu winds its way 853 kilometres through the Amazon to the coast. In 2015, the collapse of a dam released highly contaminated water from mining into the river, causing an ecological disaster. But the plight of the village needs to be seen in a wider context in and beyond Brazil.
In speaking of extinction, the book goes beyond the fate of so many First Nations’ people around the world to expose a pattern of grief that falls over life itself. For the Krenak people, this fate is most evident in the loss of the place of the river in their everyday existence. Before the 2015 dam break, the river had already been defiled by contamination from a hydroelectric station. So it’s now impossible for these indigenous people to live sustainably.
Ailton Krenak saw the village encounter with the COVID-19 virus as ‘a natural organism’ attacking the way of life that humankind had chosen for itself. Of this, he remarks on the ignorance of Jair Bolsonaro, the then-president of the nation. Bolsonaro said that the indigenous and poor of the population ‘have privileged immunity to disease, because they walk through sewage every day and don’t catch a thing’. With a thread of hope, he explains what underpins the title of his book. ‘My main reason for postponing the end of the world is because we’ve always got time for one more story.’ I hope we have!
"Ailton Krenak's ideas inspire, washing over you with every truth-telling sentence. Read this book." - Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers
Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene.
From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society's flawed concept of "humanity" - that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it…
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
First published in Italy in 1972, it arrived in English two years later and is now regarded as a classic. It is based on a fiction journey by Kublai Khan to over fifty cities, each with particular features and qualities: they are all fictional. However, they all in some way reflect the character of Venice.
What makes it one of my favorite books is the way its evocative language animates a world of imagination. What unfolds is fantastic rather than fantasy. It has inspired my own writing, and I have recently written a companion work—Disappearing Cities. It also is a collection of short stories engaging around fifty imaginary cities. It is now with my publisher. Besides the influence of Calvino, it was also prompted by two books mentioned above: Amitav Ghosh fusion of climate change and fiction, and Ailton Krenak evocation of stories that postpone the end of the world.
In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.'
This book examines the relations of the forces of change: enviro-climatically, geopolitically, ideologically, technologically, and their impacts in ways that expose causal conditions. It does so by going beyond the ways in which accelerating crises are rationalized and represented in the media. As such, it cuts through appearances to show what is beneath them. In doing so, it recognizes crises are now combining to create a ‘compound condition’ that existing institutionalized politics cannot comprehend or adequately respond to.
Specifically, the scale of the dangers posed by climate change, the proximity of global conflict, and by technology as implicated in both, and as a danger in itself, together with the way the global order is being reconfigured, are creating a uniquely dangerous condition.
