book reviews

Phew, it's been a long time coming.

You're Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, by Deborah Tannen
Worthwhile reading if you're a woman struggling to comprehend inexplicable reactions of your grown mother. Tannen's writing style lacks in conciseness and effectiveness; but she gets her points across: [with a big IN GENERAL for everything that follows]

• that it's so painful and complicated because we're so close;
  
• that caring and criticizing can be two sides of the same coin;
  
• that daughters, only too aware of the influence their mother still has on them, generally significantly underestimate the power they also hold in their mothers' lives (both want approval);
  
• that having brothers and watching the different treatment they get from the same mother can sting;
  
• that grandkids is the most powerful weapon a daughter has against her own mother;
• that mothers feel compelled to protect their daughters - up until the point where mothers age and daughters take on that responsibility;
• that mothers are the lightrod for criticism: that truthfully daughters are more critical of them than of anyone else (apart from their own selves perhaps); and that daughters don't think twice about criticizing mom even for something for which she's partly or not at all guilty of. Because it's safe.

Unfortunately you also learn along the way that mothers whose daughters did 'better' than them (academically or in earnings) are often resentful of their daughters' successes - a reality you don't find with fathers or daughters who did not excel. A daughter is both supposed to accomplish what her mother would've liked to do differently in her life, yet not to go too far from her mom (including geographically), else the mother feel rejected and irrelevant.
Most interesting was the spiralling out of control analysis, whereby the natural reflexes of a mother and her daughter just make each other worse - think mother wanting to be more involved in her daughter's life, and asking more questions, calling more frequently or dropping by more, and as a reaction her daughter stepping back more, not calling as much to not encourage this, hereby making the mother feel the urge to call even more, and so on to no good.


Identity and Violence, by Amartya Sen
Highly recommend it; a great deconstruction of the so-called "clash of civilizations" bs theory. Also not the most condensed writing though (or perhaps I'm simply impatient these days)
From the book cover:
Sen argues in this book that conflict and violence are sustained today, no less than in the past, by the illusion of a unique identity. Indeed, the world is increasingly taken to be a federation of religions (or of "culture" or "civilization"), ignoring the relevance of other ways in which people see themselves, involving class, gender, profession, language, literature, science, music, morals, or politics. Global attempts to stop such violence are also handicapped by the conceptual disarray generated by the presumption of singular and choiceless identity. When relations among different human beings are identified with a "clash of civilizations", or alternately with "amity among civilizations", human beings are miniaturized and deposited into little boxes.
Through his penetrating investigation of such diverse subjects as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, fundamentalism, terrorism, and globalization, Sen brings out the need for a clearheaded understanding of human freedom and the effectiveness of constructive public voice in global civil society. The world, Sen shows, can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has recently spiraled toward violence and war.


Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins
I was entirely predisposed to love this book - finally, an insider spilling the beans about the corrupt world of large greedy corporations in cohute with the G5 governments and international institutions (world bank, IMF), and detailing their sneaky tactics of using bogus economic projections for engulfing poorer countries into endless debts all the while advancing the global empire of the corporatocracy.
Well, I almost liked it... Definitely recommend it for DJ (goes back to our discussions about whether US actions should be termed imperialist or not).
Definitely includes some interesting tidbits of information about the Summer Institute of Linguistics to name just one - a controversial missionary organization who got kicked out after allegations that it was performing the dirty work of oil companies and the CIA by kicking indigenous people out of their oil-rich land with tactics such as diarrhea-inducing food packages.

But what infuriates me is the lack of sophistication and believability in this book.
All the interesting people are 'beautiful'. The NSA connection is an utter guess. The one who co-opted him into becoming an economic hit man? disappeared magically after a few weeks, never to be heard of again. All the heads of states he's rubbed shoulders with are dead; who could dispute him? His conscience that started bugging him on page 1? 30 years later, he publishes. There is not a single fact in here which has not been disclosed previously (where is the insider information? the numbers to back his story?). Yet he was magically in all the exciting places at the right time, and always one of the almost good guys who wanted to mingle with the locals.

I am entirely dismayed that it only takes a guy like him to take down countries - one who's not even an economist, one who's not even very articulate, one whose knowledge of his historic models (e.g. Tom Paine) is amazingly vague.
There is no sophistication. And yet the wheel keeps on turning and the gap between the five wealthiest and five poorest countries keeps on widening despite all the wonderful 'successes' of our international institutions.
If there is no sophistication, why can't this be stopped?
Btw he's got a new book out, The Secret History of the American Empire.

I also started Evening News by Marly Swick and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, but I ended up putting both of them down.
The writings of both seems compelling, but neither subject matter is right for me at the moment.