I’m spending most of this month and last looking over the Hudson River, from Jersey City to New York. It’s a good vantage point to be an observer of global interactions and politics. It is from here that I have read most of the books I have reviewed so far for Zócalo Public Square.
Three of those books have been about American foreign policy in the Middle East. To be sure, the three were very different in style and content, but in so many ways they all underscore the simple need for context. It is a desperate need in these days of information overload and soundbite news. While the foreign policy histories and opinions in the books that I reviewed are essential for thinking about monumental existential issues like national security, the act of consistently reading books is a reminder to take more time to think about, well, everything. Sometimes it’s best that life move at the speed of books.
Here are some excerpts and links in case you’re interested. Read more on Life at the Speed of Books…
Last week, Zócalo Public Square ran the first book review I wrote for them. The inaugural piece was on The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty by R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan. Here’s an excerpt:
Read more on Book reviews at Zócalo Public Square…
Ok, maybe not so big to you, but big to me.
After struggling with bugginess and hand-coding for years, I finally made the switch from Movable Type to Wordpress. Let me know what you think and if you find any broken links. RSS feeds and permalinks should still work properly (fingers crossed).
Read more on website update: the big switch…
This week I’m revisiting one of my favorite books, the famous fictionalized account of the last months in the life of South American liberator Simon Bolivar by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I cannot recall the first time I read The General in His Labyrinth except that it was early in my college career and it opened my eyes to world literature. My notes in the book seem completely unfamiliar — I appear to have fact-checked the book, not just against history but also to spot the moments which are fantasies of the character Bolivar’s troubled mind. Now, I read the book differently. I am drawn to Manuela Saenz, whom the General loves with an incomprehensible depth. What is more incomprehensible is the way that she loves him, despite his pride and his descent, or maybe because of those things. Here is one of Garcia Marquez’s earliest introductions to Manuela:
Read more on more than politics…
