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.
Slow Finance, by Gervais Williams, Bloomsbury, London, Sterling £20, 183 pages
There’s food for thought in adopting the principles of the Slow Cooking movement and applying them to making investment decisions. Typically the Slow Cooking aficionado chooses ingredients carefully, preparing them the night before, cutting meat into small chunks, trimming the vegetables. In the morning they go into a vessel which cooks them slowly at a lower heat, allowing all the juices and flavours to blend. In the evening the smell of a delicious casserole wafts out from the kitchen. This makes a much more appetising prospect than zapping an “unidentified frying object” in a microwave, as celebrity chef Keith Floyd used to say.
Endgame the End of the Debt Supercycle and How It Changes Everything, John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey, $27.95, 2011, 318 pages.
American Gridlock Why the Right and Left Are Both Wrong, H. Woody Brock, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey, $27.95, 2012, 273 pages.
In Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber identifies an essential difference between happiness and misery.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Two recent books consider the muddle politicians, bankers and economists have made of the world’s finances, during which the Micawber doctrine sadly got forgotten. They focus on the debt burden we have strapped on to the backs of coming generations and tackle the inability of current political systems to confront the ensuing mess.
The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.,
Public Affairs Books, New York, 310 pp, €21.40
Terrorism and Political Violence July-August 2011
Therese Delpesh. Iran and the Bomb: The Abdication of International Responsibility. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 148 pp, $19.50 paper. ISBN: 978-0-231-70006-1.
The author, a director of strategic studies at the French Atomic Energy Commission and commissioner with the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission, is well placed to independently assess this subject. She succeeds admirably.
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Terrorism and Political Violence July-August 2011
Azzam Tamimi. Hamas: Unwritten Chapters. London: C Hurst & Co., 2007 .352 pp., £14.95 paper. ISBN: 978-18-506-5834-4.
A former American diplomat has written a book which helps focus on how Ireland should deal with the terrorism of the people responsible for the murder of PSNI constable Ronan Kerr, and attempts at various other atrocities.
Money, by Eric Lonergan; Acumen Publishing (part of the Art of Living Series); 149 Pages; ISBN 978-1-84465-203-7; Sterling £7.48