Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple, by Randall L. Schweller. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 216 pp. €20.15.
Change is the natural order of the world, but change is happening ever faster, and frequently turning into fragmentation and disorder, while the ability of man and institutions to react is daily more exposed. We see this in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, much of Africa, and elsewhere, in what increasingly appears to be an inexplicable, chaotic, and disjointed world.
The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura, translated by Anna Kushner. Bitter Lemon Press, 2014, 592 pages, £20.00 (hardback).
Putting real-life characters into a novel is a high-risk enterprise. Padura, a Cuban writer of acclaimed crime noir thrillers, weaves together the experiences of Leon Trotsky in exile, his eventual assassin, Ramon Mercader, and the Cuban narrator, Ivan Cardenas who meets an exiled Spaniard (who may or may not be Mercader) walking on a Cuban beach in 1976. The three protagonists share two features. The first is a love of dogs, particularly Russian borzoi wolfhounds, and each of their lives is dominated by the evil machinations of Stalin. And so the story begins.
Be Careful What You Wish for,
With the hoped for shift in power from US hegemony the world will be even more fearful and anarchical.
Want to know more about Hamas? Will it outgrow its bloody birth-pangs and become a reputable expression of Palestinian identity in a very troubled part of the Middle East? Read my detailed assessment of Hamas –Unwritten Chapters, published in 2007 by leading Hamas activist Azzam Tamimi, and learn about its real agenda.
The West should have seen Putin coming – but failed to decode what his propaganda machine was telling us. This article, written before the fatal missile attack on a Malaysian airliner in July 2014, sets out clearly the game the Russian president is playing, and how ineffective the West has been in dealing with it. Putin may not have ordered the attack but he controls the chess pieces on the board.
There is a fairly widespread feeling in international circles that the Obama presidency promised more than it delivered, and the continuity in national security policy of the Bush presidency is seen as part of this. Many observers, at home and abroad, are disappointed at this, and struggle to explain how Obama has signally failed to live up to his promise of fundamental change.
Read Richard Whelan on Al Qaeda Resurgent, on how the Arab Spring and clumsy strategic responses by the West, have given radical Islamic terrorism the kiss of life – Village magazine Dec 2013-January 2014 issue www.villagemagazine.ie.
In May 1, 2011, when US Navy Seals and CIA agents tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan, President Obama immediately linked his death to the 9/11 attacks on America. Justice had been done; Al Qaeda had suffered a devastating blow, the president proclaimed.
As currencies go, the European single currency is not in great shape. The problems of the two-speed Eurozone are well known but the consequences of the failure of repeated waves of measures to fix it are not yet fully understood. We struggle on in hope of some new measure, probably from Frankfurt, to get it through the current storm and into less turbulent waters. Continue reading