Nation Books

China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:17:00 +0000

In China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa, Serge Michel and Michel Beuret invest a lot of time and energy in examining China’s presence in African countries. They travel to various places to interview different people in order to find out what affects Chinese business has across the continent. China is quickly colonizing African counties with a speed that must make Western colonizers like America, England, and France (to name a few) burn with envy.

The environment doesn’t matter, the people don’t matter, and future generations certainly don’t either. What is important is the almighty dollar—er, yuan. Nobody and nothing is indispensable. Even the average Chinese laborer who travels from the mainland to work the fields, factory, pipelines, and mines is expendable. He makes more money in the Congo than he ever could in China, and as an added bonus, if he dies in a work-related accident, it will net his family back home a few extra yuan—so his death isn’t seen as a complete waste, but an honorable sacrifice.

It isn’t just the natural resources that China is trying to take as it competes with Western countries for contracts. African governments favour doing business with China and give construction contracts to Chinese companies. In return, all these nations have to do is hand over a bit of oil, which then increases the need for construction of more pipe lines. (More contracts for China!), or other enviable resources—like Niger's uranium. China may give out loans to build dams and highways, but the money comes with a cost: Chinese labor is preferred instead providing jobs for local people, the construction quality is poor, and there are no unions to protect the workers.

Also, Chinese businesses have made, and continue to make, a lot of money off of selling their cheap manufactured goods to African consumers. Whatever the consumer needs, from Islamic prayer mats to plastic souvenirs sold by the Nile River to rifles and handguns for regional warring, China makes all of the items at a cheaper cost than its competitors.

The information China Safari offers about the Chinese exploitation of African (and Chinese) workers is a hefty wake up call for those in the pursuit of global fair trade and environmental and human rights. The bleak reality of industrial “progress” in places across the African continent are well-documented in this book__. The authors leave no stone unturned. The amount of research they did for this book is staggering, and I was shocked to read just how deeply China has sunk its claws into the world's poorest continent.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, October 13th 2009

Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence Are Changing America

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:32:00 +0000

By Sarah Garland

Nation Books

As sprawl becomes less environmentally acceptable, foreclosures soar, and media trumpet the end of the suburban dream, the suburbs or at least some of them, have emerged as a problem, rather than as a solution. Although the house prices in the true islands of affluence have fallen, crime, drugs, and gangs are emerging in suburban neighborhoods abandoned to working-class and immigrant people. Sarah Garland provides an in-depth analysis of how the Long Island suburb of Hempstead decayed in her book, Gangs in Garden City. She also explores how interconnected the decay of Hempstead and other such communities is to other critical issues such as foreign policy, the war on drugs, immigration, and No Child Left Behind.

However, front and center are the stories of individuals, from gang members to police to educators. We meet Julio, the child soldier of the U.S.-funded Salvadoran army, who braves the perilous border crossing to join his mother in the United States. His attempts to ameliorate the gang problem in Hempstead are rebuffed by authorities and he ends up detained by immigration authorities and eventually agrees to be deported back to El Salvador, where his gang associations still haunt his life. Jessica will especially engage feminist readers. A tough tomboy, who still wants a frilly dress for her fifteenth birthday celebration, she faces fatal retribution when she runs afoul of gang politics.

Garland tracks the gangs of the title from Central America and back, but avoids the facile explanation that views the source of the problem as coming from elsewhere. She traces the ideology of suburbia back to the garden city of the book title, a concept that grew out of the distaste for the slums created by industrialization and urbanization, a flawed ideal of a contained community safe from the outside world. Once a rural village, Hempstead transformed into a suburb in the 1940s and, because of its mix of older single-family housing and apartments, was one of the first suburbs to be racially integrated. She explores the implications of retail flight, a declining tax base, and drug traffic in Hempstead from the point of view of the police chief, the school principal, and county politicians. Add a misguided foreign and immigration policies to this toxic mix, and the result is the sad story of Hempstead. She also explores the uses made of gang activity in stoking the public’s fear of crime for political advantage.

The benefits of meeting the human beings affected by the unfolding sociological disaster are somewhat undercut by the sometimes confused narrative. The intentional intertwining of their stories and the decision to intersperse their stories in necessary exposition about changes in legislation, city planning ideas, and juvenile justice theories make the story difficult to follow at times. Then again, Garland never ignores the complexities attending this issue. For, that she deserves our gratitude.

Written by: Frances Chapman, September 24th 2009

A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:30:00 +0000

By Wadad Makdisi Cortas

Nation Books

Nostalgia is front and center in Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ atmospheric memoir of life in Beirut, a war-torn city once belonging to Syria and later, the capital of Lebanon. Born in 1909, Cortas died in 1979, but her impassioned account of a four-decade career as principal of the Ahliah School for Girls touches on themes that remained pertinent throughout the twentieth century—colonialism and the founding of Israel, among them.

Cortas was fiercely committed to the education of girls and sought international examples to prod her students into imagining an array of possibilities for their lives. American journalist Dorothy Thompson gave a talk on campus; so did Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman president of the UN General Assembly; Bertha Vester, a Jerusalem resident who founded a children’s hospital; and Helen Keller. “Nationalism as a chauvinist ideal never took root in our school,” Cortas writes. “Fairness, humanity, and principles of equal rights all found deep expression in our collective inner life.”

Her descriptions of visits to Palestine before 1917’s Balfour Declaration—in which Lord Arthur Balfour promised to give Palestine to the Zionists—and following the creation of Israel as a Jewish homeland, are gripping. “For Arabs the problem of Palestine was our common denominator,” she writes. Her position was, in part, shaped by Jawaharlal Nehru’s assertion: “When the British declared that they were willing to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine, Palestine was not a wilderness. There were Arabs and non-Arabs living there, Moslems and Christians… Zionism is a colonial movement. The generous offer of the British was made at the expense of Arabs.”

Cortas’ allies in opposing Israel included Albert Einstein, who favored a bi-national state in Palestine and condemned the violence and terrorism wrought by the Haganah and the Stern Gang against Palestinian villagers. In fact, Cortas consistently sought to include the voices of anti-Zionist Jews in her work, and her outspoken activism always included expression of distress over Jewish persecution in Europe. As the same time, she writes, she felt that it was unjust “that the Arab world was being forced to bear the consequences of Europe’s cruelty.”

Yet despite the efforts of anti-Zionists the world over, in 1949, Israel came into being. Not long after, Lebanon was torn apart by civil war and Cortas’ memoir closes with a searing account of the fighting, 1974-1978. “Hatred breeds hatred,” she concludes, “and love breeds love.”

This simple statement sums up Cortas’ philosophy toward both her students and toward political engagement. An optimist but not a Pollyanna, her example is invigorating. While I wished A World I Loved had provided a bridge between her death and today—an afterward, perhaps, about the Ahliah School and the state of contemporary women’s education in Arab countries—the book is nonetheless fascinating. Full of nuanced historical detail and rich observations, it reintroduces a foremother whose wit and grace help explicate the political quagmires of the twenty-first century.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, May 11th 2009

The Ten Minute Activist

admin — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:32:00 +0000

By The Mission Collective

Nation Books

The Ten Minute Activist provides a dense, insightful education into what one individual can do, or not do, to live in a more environmentally conscious manner. It is not written in a preachy or condescending manner; instead, its authors, five individuals jointly known as The Mission Collective, have written a witty and approachable text. What, you ask, are some of the issues that are discussed in The Ten Minute Activist? Here is a short sampling the smorgasbord of topics in the text: how your daily routines and product use impact the earth; suggestions for sharing resources with friends and neighbors; and ways to slow down and appreciate your food and your surroundings.

The text is interspersed with illustrations by Lloyd Dangle, which are frightening because of the frankness of their message. Another compelling aspect of the book is its references to websites, books and phone numbers so that readers can take action or further research any of the topics in the text. The Ten Minute Activist is written in a laid-back, approachable style, while still packing oodles of essential information into its pages. This book is necessary reading for individuals who want to start to tread more lightly upon the earth, and for individuals who have been living in an environmentally conscientious manner for years. After owning this text for only a couple of weeks, nearly half of its pages are earmarked so I can return to the information to reread chapters or to follow the writers’ recommendations on where to do additional research on a particular subject. The Ten Minute Activist is a book that is not only praiseworthy and ambitious in its own right, but also leads its readers in other directions, thus helping its readers to gain a broad, well educated perspective on the issues facing our environment.

Written by: Kirsha Frye-Matte, April 11th 2007