Tag: history

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Inflation, growth, unemployment, balanced budgets are weaponized to enforce market dependency

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Amid financial crisis, pandemic and war, Capitalism seems invincible. Professor of Economics at the University of Tulsa, Clara E Mattei illustrates its fragility and restores hope that everything could be different Yanis Varoufakis. Economics is sold as pure and apolitical: scientific, neutral, exact. This book reveals the true role: to convince us there’s no alternative to capitalism. Mattei rips the mask off our economic system, and unpacks key concepts like growth, inflation, unemployment and balanced budgets to show how they’re weaponized to enforce market dependence, not freedom, stripping us of the power to shape the democratic decisions that govern our … Continue reading Inflation, growth, unemployment, balanced budgets are weaponized to enforce market dependency

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Political power, religion, and perpetual dissent

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Mohammed Hanif, Booker-longlisted author’s lively and rich novel about the power of language, friendship, and protest in the face of political turmoil. Rebel English Academy is set during the rapid descent of semi-socialist Pakistan into neither its first nor last period of military dictatorship. In 1979, the army’s hanging of leftist prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto precipitates mysterious changes in the Punjab province.  Sir Baghi, a closeted gay communist English teacher who stopped volunteering his critiques of the government after being subjected to brutal torture, when a widow and former track runner Sabiha Bano, on the run arrives at his door … Continue reading Political power, religion, and perpetual dissent

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Murders connected to drug trafficking in elite units

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In December 2020, a deer hunter discovered two dead bodies that had been riddled with bullets and dumped in forested corner of Fort Bragg, one of the dead men, Master Sergeant William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force. The other victim, Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas, was a quartermaster attached to the Special forces who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad, and had written a blackmail letter threatening to expose criminality in the special operations task force in Afghanistan. Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and … Continue reading Murders connected to drug trafficking in elite units

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Bitter challenger for the farmer, moneylender and the pimp

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Although the story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes, Kim Bowes, professor of Ancient History and archaeology at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, in Surviving Rome, unearths history of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labour. Bowes focuses on the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokies. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a … Continue reading Bitter challenger for the farmer, moneylender and the pimp

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Self taught social empathy

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Would you predict that a British aristocrat would so energize American antifascist and civil rights struggles that Time magazine would crown her “Queen of Muckrakers”? Jessica Mitford, known as Decca, was brought up by eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Her beautiful sisters have been subjects of books and movies dedicated to their naughty, glamorous lives. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel’s life. As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mould. Instead of setting for life as a professional Beauty, … Continue reading Self taught social empathy

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Captivating generational saga

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Patrick Ryan conjures a vanished America with deep insight and lyrical intelligence about war and adultery, the mysteries of sexuality and family life, and the strange paths we have to travel to forgive or at least begin to understand the people who’ve hurt us the most.  A small-town novel about two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.  In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret … Continue reading Captivating generational saga

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Immigration practical pitfalls of making policy

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Alan Manning – former chair of the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee- makes it clear, this doesn’t mean that we can’t do much better. In Why Immigration Policy is Hard, Manning says we should start by ditching simplistic views that frame immigration as either wholly good or wholly bad. We will always have, and need, some level of immigration. But just as inevitably, we will have rules on who can and cannot immigrate as more people are likely to want to move to high-income countries than residents will want to admit. To set those rules, we need reliable evidence to adjudicate … Continue reading Immigration practical pitfalls of making policy

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Mushroom murderer

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Three renowned writers of true crime Helen Garner (greatest contemporary writer), Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (legal expert) tracked Erin Patterson’s preminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell, a town east of Melbourne, and close to Leongatha, where the deadly dish was served, and spent unlimited hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: Love, Hate, Jealousy, Revenge, Marriage, Money, Mycology and Murder. The writers explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true … Continue reading Mushroom murderer

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Ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the colonies

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Ruthless is a revelation of Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency and exploitation that enabled it. Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ones for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain’s colonies, where a brutalised enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories? Historian Edmond Smith reveals how the world’s first industrial nation was founded on the ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the planet. This economic system linked the plantations of the Caribbean with the colossal cotton mills of northern England, applied … Continue reading Ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the colonies

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Amur Tigers

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In the forests of northeast Asia home to fish owls, brown bears, musk deer, moose, wolves, raccoon dogs, leopards and tigers, and by the end of Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur Rive basin. Soon, the Soviet Union fell, bringing catastrophe, without the careful oversight of a central authority, poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species Amur Tiger. Slaght in his book Tigers Between Empires, dealing with the isolated population inhabiting the Amur  basin in Siberia, parts of the river separate inland China from Russia’s eastern … Continue reading Amur Tigers