Good book. Somewhere along the lines of Fahrenheit 451, only approached from a different angle. Ella Minnow Pea is set on a small utopian-type island named for one Nevin Nollop, that linguistic genius who first penned the phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Nollop’s memory is immortalized in both the love and prowess the island’s inhabitants have for language and a statue erected in the town square in his honor featuring the famous phrase. All is well in life on the island until suddenly the letters on the statue begin to fall from the phrase, moving the island’s governing council to declare the falling letters to be communication from beyond the grave from their beloved linguistic ancestor and begin barring the usage of the fallen letters.

I liked the epistolary form Dunn takes for this novel. The letters are written by various island inhabitants, most from the story’s heroine, a young girl for whom the book is named. As letters drop from Nollop’s statue and are subsequently banned from use on the island of Nollop, they disappear from the letters comprising the book as well.

Ella, like Fahrenheit 451 and other dystopian novels, has myriad subtle messages about the dangers of totalitarianism and allowing one’s rights to be taken without a struggle; the book is, however, more lighthearted and not quite so dark as other dystopias.

A quick, enjoyable read. It is, as Ella describes itself, “a quirky novel with pages of zany, jumbled lexicon.”

Took me a little while to get into the book, but I liked it once I did. Foer has a unique style of writing, I enjoyed it. The story is sad but worth the read.

Globalizing Rights is an edited volume of essays about various aspects of human rights as related to globalization, written by well known and respected scholars and intellectuals in the field. Each essay is followed by a response written by another scholar, sometimes a scholar cited in the work to which they are responding.

Eh, it was all right. I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the responses. Nearly all of the responses dealt with just a small aspect of the article in question; I felt they could have been taken further and that there were still many, many aspects of the essays that merited a response or rebuttal. Most responses were only a few pages, hardly enough to explore in depth the issues raised by the essays. I thought the essay written by Susan George, “Globalizing Rights?”, wasn’t very well written or argued at all. Vandana Shiva’s article “Food Rights, Free Trade, and Fascism” was one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read.

I’ve marked it worth reading, but to really be worth your time, it should be read as a way to start a discussion (or at least start thinking critically) about the issues it raises. The essays all provide lots of opportunities for a critical examination of the issues they raise, discussion, and debate. I don’t think this is a book to be read and accepted at face value without some critical reflection on its contents.

I haven’t gotten to read a book with a picture on every page in years! That is, at least, not a book that I wasn’t reading to a little kid!

Found this in the local library yesterday. My sister had to go there for some research for a paper she’s writing, so I wandered around looking for anything interesting, and found this. It was fun. Bit old (printed in 1967) so it covers US foreign policy up until about détente. Even so, it’s still interesting. Good suppliment to any book/course about US history or US diplomatic history, since cartoons show domestic sentiment about foriegn policy. It was interesting seeing the views of different newspapers and publishing companies change (or stay the same) over time.

One random comment: I think the artistic quality of political cartoons has gone downhill since the addition of color.

Read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum instead. Foucault’s Pendulum is everything the Da Vinci Code dreams it could be.

That said, I enjoyed reading DVC. The key to reading this book is to remember that it is primarily a work of FICTION. Take everything that Dan Brown says about the Church, Opus Dei, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Da Vinci, art history…actually, everything Dan Brown says that seems like it should be based in fact…take it all with a grain of salt. A shaker of salt is more like it.

If you’re going to read it, just be skeptical about everything he says that seems factual. Remember that Brown is primarily a fiction writer, not a religious scholar, not an art historian, not a Parisian tour guide.

If you’re looking for a good conspiracy theory novel, go with Foucault’s Pendulum instead.

Lakoff is a cognitive scientist, studying the way the mind works in regards to language. In Moral Politics, he takes his background in cognitive science and applies it to American politics, anaylsing the way that liberals and conservatives use language to talk about the issues that matter to them to come up with a coherent, well thought out theory about why liberals and conservatives think the way they think and why they believe what they do. According to Lakoff’s theory, for which he offers extensive supporting evidence based on his own research and observations of mainstream political discourse, liberal and conservative politics are based on two inherently, drastically different world views, each stemming from a different ideological model of the ideal family structure, then extending the model of the family to apply to the nation as a family. The two different family ideologies, combined with the nation-as-family conception, produce the full range of liberal and conservative political positions. Lakoff’s model explains, for example, what conservative opposition to environmentalism has to do with conservative opposition to gun control and to the minimum wage.

One of Lakoff’s greatest strengths, in my opinion, is that he is very clear in stating his bias from the outset. He makes no attempt to hide the fact that he considers himself a political liberal. That said, as a scientist, most of his book is written in a very nonbiased manner. The book has six parts. Five are written in a nonbiased, straightforward, scientific sort of way. The final part is where Lakoff addresses his fellow liberals with advice on how to apply the newfound knowledge of the subconscious roots of American politics to reframe debates and be generally more successful in politics than liberals in recent years have been.

However, don’t let the fact that Lakoff is liberal and includes a chapter specifically directed at liberals stop you from reading the book. As I said, the first five parts are worth reading on their own. To any conservative who might brush aside Lakoff as a scientist on the basis of Lakoff as a political being, I would challenge you to read the book so we could hold an informed debate. Read the last section too, so you can inform yourself about what liberal scholars and activists are going to try to start doing, to better prepare yourself to meet us in informed debate.

Contrary to the other entry about this book here, it isn’t written in a poor manner at all, it just reads like a textbook. Lakoff makes the same points over and over, repeats concepts central to his theories, and uses many examples to explain things – it reads like a textbook. His writing style in Moral Politics is very similar to the style of Metaphors We Live By – textbookish.

Recommended for anyone with an interest in either cognitive science or linguistics, or anyone seeking a better understanding of American politics.

Ok, so I didn’t exactly read it cover to cover. I used it for a paper I was writing about Cicero and oratory in ancient Rome. It was very helpful. Probably worth actually reading for anyone with an interest in Ancient Greece or Rome, classics, rhetoric, and whatnot.

I couldn’t really get into it. I got about halfway through it without ever feeling any particular affinity for the heroine or the plot. I then lent it to my roommate over spring break, who read it and loved it. I, however, decided it hadn’t captured my interest enough for me to pick it back up, and slated it for bookcrossing rather than give it the space in my luggage to come back to the US.

Who knows, maybe I’ll pick it up again from the library in the summer. I just couldn’t get into it, that’s all.

The Choice is basically a discussion of the implications of American hegemony for American democracy, American national security, and global security. Brzezinski begins by discussing the global political environment and current security threats, both to the US and to the world at large. He then moves on to discussing current and future American policy options in response to these threats.

Brzezinksi sees American foreign policy, currently enjoying the historically unique situation as a global hegemonic power, as having two basic foreign policy options (or, rather, two basic visions on which our foreign policy can be based): hegemony and leadership based on the consent of the global community, or simple American domination of world politics. While simple domination would be costly, unstable, and unlikely to last very long, consensual leadership, based on a policy of encouraging multi-/inter-/supra-national cooperation, building strong alliances, and taking the opinions of close allies into consideration while shaping foreign policy, would increase both American supremacy and the legitimacy of American hegemony.

Brzezinski also discusses the implications of hegemony for American democracy itself. According to Brzezinksi, the two have historically been incompatible; he uses the example of Ancient Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire as a cautionary tale. He cautions against the threat to civil rights that comes from a “garrison state mentality” and foreign policy based on the paranoid fear of a vague, ill-defined entity such as “terrorists”.

All in all, a good book, definitely worth the read for anyone with an interest in international politics or American foreign policy.

Actually his argument isn’t very well respected (cough) in academia, it really isn’t that great of an argument, but it’s worth reading just because it’s well known and referred to often and somehow seems to have [at least partially] inspired current American foreign policy.