Skip to main content

December 10, 2017

From The TLS (Margaret Drabble on Books of the Year 2017):
Margherita Giacobino’s Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter (Dedalus; translated by Judith Landry) tells the story of a Piedmontese family from a village in the foothills of the Alps, 30 kilometres from Turin. Part memoir and part fiction, it covers the twentieth century, and evokes lives emerging from rural poverty to the affluence of the 1950s, from a diet of polenta and maggoty chestnuts where bread is a luxury to canned vegetables and refrigerators, from goatherding and wool carding to factory work and shopkeeping. Giacobino, now an academic specializing in gender studies, pieces together her ancestry from dourly posed photographs and anecdotes and shipping registers, with a focus on her hardworking great-aunt, the strong woman of the tribe. It’s like a rural version of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga: this family, like Ferrante’s, spoke dialect, not Italian. It’s a powerful and atmospheric record of largely unexplored terrain.

From The Guardian (Gordon Brown on Best Books of 2017):
Spending much of the year writing a book of my own has left me with a deeper and more personal understanding – and sympathy for – the challenges confronting authors. In fiction, I was impressed but challenged by the originality and scope of George Saunders’s Booker-winning story of grief and empathy, Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) and enjoyed Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton) (and now look forward to her Winter), but I would opt for John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking), not least for Smiley’s dramatic and surprising closing revelation of his reason for a life-time of spying – and lying. In autobiography, Nelson Mandela’s Dare Not Linger (with Mandla Langa, Macmillan) cannot rival Long Walk to Freedom – he died with it unfinished – but it reveals the struggles, setbacks and frustrations that to this very day thwart the progress of Africa. And Branko Milanović’s much underestimated Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard), now being published in many languages, tells us more than any other recent book about the state of the world we live in and, at a time when hope is so urgently needed, offers us thought-provoking insights into the world we could become.

From The New York Times (on Rachel Seiffert's A Boy in Winter):
Seiffert’s intricate novel probes the bonds and betrayals in a Ukrainian town as it succumbs to Hitler.

From The Economist:
Crises often come when an unforeseen but otherwise survivable investor panic becomes self-fulfilling. Knowing when the world will flit between states is impossible.

From The New Yorker:
[Only] by having a deep local sense of place can one have a larger loyalty that contains within it the necessary contradictions and limits...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 27, 2018

From The New York Times : [Steven] Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all. Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent. There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent. Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the...
Post a Comment
Read more