Category — Book Reviews

I haven’t written a book review in a while, not because I have stopped reading, but more-so the fact I have just been lazy. However this morning after finishing the second novel of Khaled Hosseini (also wrote The Kite Runner), I felt implored to do so.

The reason I felt so strongly about this book is that at its core, this novel gives you an overview of Afghanistan from the time it was occupied by the Russians through the years of fighting by warlords and the Taliban, and finally into the most recent years after the bombings and the UN have arrived. However more than a simple history lesson this novel gives you insight into the lives of people who lived throughout these times. I really feel Khaled wanted to get that information out, so that people could understand (if even in a very minor sense) the changes the people of Afghanistan have gone through, and what they have had to deal with. The beauty of this novel is that this information is not the story, it is the backdrop to the story. The main story itself is a very compelling tail that will keep you wanting to read more. Thus with everything put together, you end up with a novel with an excellent story that due to its backdrop gives you an insight into a world you probably don’t hear too much about.

Of course the perspective you gain is from a single person, based on his own experiences and knowledge of the country, however it gives you hopefully a little more of a picture than the 30 second clips you see on TV.

Finally I just wanted to say, while I stand a little undecided on our involvement in Afghanistan, this book gives you a better understanding of what our troops are fighting for, helping to rebuild and the people they are protecting and looking after.

In the end while the story may not have been as good as The Kite Runner, I felt I gained so much more from this novel. It has left me with a better understanding of the problems faced in Afghanistan, the constant struggles the people must have gone through, and at the end a very small feeling of hope for the people living there.

Just finished reading this book today. It doesn’t delve too deeply into Bobby’s personal life, but rather tells the fantastic story of Bobby Orr, the best player to ever play hockey. Before this book I really didn’t know a lot about Orr, other than that he was one of the greatest players to ever play, and that his career was cut short due to knee injuries. This book could be separated into two halves. The first half which tells the story from when he was a child playing in Parry Sound, how he got discovered by the Bruins, and the lengths that a one Wren Blair took to get Bobby to choose the Bruins over the other 5 teams in the league (back then there wasn’t an amateur draft). Then into the second half which starts with the relationship formed between Allen Eagleson and Bobby Orr, and how the relationship between the two of them changed the NHL forever.

After reading the book I have a bit of a bittersweet feeling towards Eagleson. The changes that came from a lot of what he did were very positive and gave the players a lot more respect and power. However Eagleson also abused the power he was given by the players and in the end betrayed them all; none so much as he betrayed Bobby Orr. I couldn’t believe that Eagleson didn’t even tell Orr about the deal from Boston that would have given Orr 18 percent in the team after his playing career was over, and that he convinced Bobby to sign in Chicago instead (The fact that Orr actually played in Chicago was news to me). It is really too bad that Eagleson didn’t get more than a little slap on the wrist for all the bad deeds he did.

This book is a great read, and one that every hockey fan should read.

Finished reading this Chomsky book about a month ago, just haven’t gotten around to talking about it. The book deals with the past 50 years in history and how the US has moved into a role of aggressor on the world stage and the reasoning why. It puts wars, acts of terrorisms and other marks in history in perspective and certainly gives new light into what the US foreign policy truly has in store for the rest of the world. I highly recommend you read this book. I will leave you here with a few quotes.

“As the invasion of Iraq began, the prominent historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger wrote that ‘The president has adopted a policy of “anticipatory self defense” that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.”

“And wit the people gone, multinationals can strip the mountains for coal, extract oil and other resources, and probably convert what is left of the land to ranching by the rich or agroexport in an environment shorn of its treasures and variety. Informed analysts and observers describe Washington’s fumigation programs as another stage in the historical process of driving poor peasants from the land for the benefit of foreign investors and Colombian elites.”

“To mention another case of contemporary relevance, when Iran’s conservative parliamentary government sought to gain control of its own resources, the US and Britain instigated a military coup to install an obedient regime that ruled with terror for twenty-five years. The coup sent a more far-reaching message, spelled out by the editors of the New York Times: ‘Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism… Iran’s experience [may] strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders [elsewhere], who will have a clear-eyed understanding of the principles of decent behavior.’”

“’The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half.’ To put it simply, Thomas Paterson writes, ‘Cuba, as a symbol and reality, challenged U.S. Hegemony in Latin America.’”

“That Nicaragua might have the right to protect its airspace from ongoing US terrorist attack is next to inconceivable. The thought was virtually never voiced – which is reasonable, too, given the principle that US actions are defensive by definition so that any reaction to them is aggression, much like the ‘internal aggression’ of the South Vietnamese in South Vietnam, ‘assaulting’ the American defenders ‘from the inside,’ in the rhetoric of Kennedy liberals.”

“Latin Americans hardly have to be reminded by Carlos Salinas, former director of government relations for Amnesty International, that they ‘know better than perhaps most people that the U.S. Government is one the biggest sponsors of terrorism.’ It is easy to dismiss the world as ‘irrelevant’ or consumed by ‘paranoid anti-Americanism,’ but perhaps not wise.”

“The war with Iraq was undertaken wit the recognition that it might well lead to the proliferation of WMD and terror, risks considered insignificant compared with the prospect of gaining control over Iraq, firmly establishing the norm of preventive war, and strengthening the hold on domestic power.”

“Since the Reagan-Bush I years (in fact before), Washington had supported Saddam Hussein in varying ways. After he stepped out of line in August 1990, policies and pretexts varied, but one element remained constant: the people of Iraq must not control their country. To repeat, the tyrant was permitted to suppress the 1991 uprising because, we were informed, Washington sought a military junta that would rule the country with an ‘iron fist,’ and if no alternative is available, Saddam would have to do.”

“Prevailing values are often expressed implicitly, as on the first anniversary of 9-11, when the president took the occasion to provide $200 million in supplemental funding for the rich country of Israel while rejecting $130 million for emergency supplemental aid to Afghanistan.”

“The Intifada also brought into the open significant changes that had been taking place within Israel. The authority of the Israeli military by then reached such levels that military correspondent Ben Kaspit described the country as ‘not a state with an army, but an army with a state.’”

“The US is by no means alone in this practice. It is traditional for states to call their own terrorism ‘counterterror,’ even the worst mass murderers: the Nazis, for example. In occupied Europe they claimed to be defending the population and legitimate governments from the partisans, terrorists supported from abroad. That was not entirely false; even the most egregious propaganda rarely is. The partisans were undoubtedly directed from London, and they did engage in terror. The US military had some appreciation of the Nazi perspective: its counterinsurgency doctrine was modeled on Nazi manuals, which were analyzed sympathetically, with the assistance of Wehrmacht officers.”

“’Delicate social and political problems cannot be bombed or “missiled” out of existence,’ two political scientists point out: ‘By dropping bombs and firing missiles, the United States only spreads these festering problems. Violence can be likened to a virus; the more you bombard it, the more it spreads.’”

“By now the danger has reached the level of a threat to human survival. But as observed earlier, it is rational to proceed nonetheless on the assumptions of the prevailing value system, which are deeply rooted in existing institutions. The basic principle is that hegemony is more important than survival. Hardly novel, the principle has been amply illustrated in the past half-century.”

“The value of a person’s interests of those with no votes are valued at zero: future generations, for example. It is therefore rational to destroy the possibility for decent survival for our grandchildren, if by so doing we can maximize our own ‘wealth’ – which means a particular perception of self-interest constructed by vast industries devoted to implanting and reinforcing it.”

“One can discern two trajectories in current history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens survival; the other dedicated to the belief that ‘another world is possible,’ in the words that animate the World Social Forum, challenging the reigning ideological system and seeking to create constructive alternatives of thought, action, and institutions. Which trajectory will dominate, no one can foretell. The pattern is familiar throughout history; a crucial difference today is that the stakes are far higher.”

Good News For a Change – David Suzuki, Holly Dressel

Good News for a Change – How Everyday People are Helping the Planet is a book just about that, about people around the world making a difference and moving towards living more suistanably. It gives really solid examples of ways people and attitudes are changing, and the actions they are taking. The book builds on previous examples as it goes through different themes and ways we need to start changing. It touches on such topics as The Natural Step, genetically modified food, deforestation, big dams, and alternative energy. I really enjoyed this book, it was easy to read and very informative, and gives a small ray of hope in all the gloom you hear. However I did find most of his examples came from only a few places, such as Germany, India and Portland. It makes it seem like only a very few are starting to make change, and also seems like he could have possibly been leaving out a lot of other great examples. Despite that I think his use of examples were all very good and applicable.

Here are a few of the better quotes I came across:

“In order for a society to be sustainable, nature’s functions and diversity are not systematically 1: subject to increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the earth’s crust; 2: subject to increasing concentrations of substances produced by society; 3:impoverished by physical displacement, over-harvesting or other forms of ecosystem manipulation. 4: In a sustainable society, resources are used fairlyand efficiently in order to meet basic human needs globally.” The Natural Step

“This obsession for maximizing profits to shareholders has got to be seen as abusiv, as dangerous, and as one of the most appalling situations on this planet. Because it makes for criminal behavior.” Anita Roddick, Founder of The Body Shop

“Today biologists have realized that confining wildlife within parks isn’t always the best way to preserve it. A landmark study published by biologist William Newmark in 1985 proved that the rate of local extinctions in parks is inversely related to the parks’ size, which means that “even regions as large as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem cannot provide sufficient demographic resilience and genetic-evolutionary fitness for key animals such as wolverines and grizzly bears.”

“So, if we lived in a world where all the humans ate one kind of plant, wore one kind of clothing and thought one kind of way, it’s obvious they would be less likely to survive any new assault than in a world in which the humans had many options of plants and animals to eat, many kinds of fibers to wear, and many kinds of philosophies through which they understood reality.”

“More than a million of the state’s (California) 3.4 million irrigated hectares (7.5 million acres) will go permanently out of production unless they are drained by buried piping. But even in affluent California, farmers are reluctant to make such an investment. It’s only a short-term solution anyway; the salt- and pesticide-laden water that’s drained off just creates problems downstream.”

“An integral part of neo-lberal economic theory and globalization, discussed in chapter two, is the idea that public agencies should be economically self-sustaining; services like health care, education or food- and water-testing are considered too expensive when run as non-profit pulbic services by state or municipal governments. Private, profit-making companies, who are credited with being leaner and more efficient, are assumed under this set of values to do a better job at delivering almost any service… Around 1997 the government (Ontario) began to contract out the work of making sure Walkerton’s water was safe to a for-profit private company in a far-away Arkansas.”

“The world today produces more food per inhabitant than ever before… 4.3 pounds for every person, every day… The real causes of hunger are poverty, inequality and lack of access.”

“The farm has to be viable economically or Salatin couldn’t keep it going.””I’m an unabashed capitalist,” he says, “But capitalism without ethics is just greed.” He sees the animals on his farm not as economic units to be exploited, but as partners helping keep the land and his family healthy.”

“If we want clean food in our future, Salatin says, we have to open our minds to a different way of valuing life and the way natural systems evolved in the first place.”

“The strange modern idea that forests are just trees and that a monocultured stand of Eucalyptus genetically engineered to express pesticides is the same thing as an ancient community of beech, brambles, vines, ferns, fungi, flowers, animals, birds and all the other living things and products a complete forest would provide, is certainly one of the most striking symptoms of how disconnected our modern culture has become from the reality of nature.”

“Even when clearcuts have successful growth in replanted seedlings, they are ecological disasters in the making. Plantation trees are not only the same species, they’re the same age (and these days, because of the very latest cloning methods, they have the same genes as well). Wilkinson tells the story of the massive European blow-down of trees in a 1986 hurricane, in which England lost 14 million trees, Holland two million and Germany six million.”

“People shouldn’t be allowed to clearcut and slash and burn forest, dynamite fish, shoot deer with canons, steal birds’ eggs and kill pregnant game animals, just because one person or group can cash in on the resource faster that way.”

“It’s becoming pretty clear that if we want to keep any of the things we need – pure food, timber, clean water, fish – we have to make changes in the way we value them, and in who manages them. We need to feel ownership responsibilities – as well as rights – over the necessities of life.”

“It’s time, in short to stop isolating things from each other and start relating them to each other. We have to realize that what we do on land affects the seas; and what happens to the seas, happens to us.”
“Every gallon of gasoline, when burned, creates more than 9 kilograms of CO2, an amount that would take a large tree about a year to absorb. It becomes mind-numbing to compute the amount of gas we burn in our cars, and the number of trees it would take to absorb that waste. But instead of saving our trees for this purpose, we are cutting them down to make into cardboard, commercial flyers and disposable packaging that we put into carbon-exhaling landfills and incinerators every day.”

“Local, democratic power is the most fundamental and necessary requirement of sustainability; the two, as we have seen, almost always go together.”

“The former director of the McGill School, Peter Brown, says he tries to make it clear to his students that the first step people have to take in understanding the world around them is to get outside the unconscious assumptions of their own culture.”

My knowledge of the Rwandan genocide going into this book was limited to the very opinionated and biased novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche. Courtemanche painted a very ugly picture of Romeo Dallaire making him out to be someone who didn’t care about the dying people and was doing nothing about it. After reading the first few chapters in this book I realized how wrong Courtemanche was. Dallaire did everything in his power to try and stop the genocide and protect the people of Rwanda only to have the UN and other world powers consistently put road blocks in his way.

Shake Hands with the Devil is written in first person narrative and documents the entire stay of Romeo Dallaire the UN Force Commander in Rwanda. This book is highly detailed and really gives you a full picture of what Dallaire was thinking and feeling throughout his entire time. It also gives you an excellent insight into the way the UN reacted (or failed to react) to the events that were going on despite the continuous efforts of Dallaire.

This book really made me see the failures of the world and the UN in doing nothing to stop the genocide. All the writings were on the wall that a genocide was about to happen yet nobody wanted to risk the lives of their troops to help prevent it. Dallaire presents his proposal he gave to the UN before the genocide started of what he would need to ensure the peace and the protection of Rwandans before the genocide started, many expects have gone over this proposal and said that it would have worked. All Dallaire asked for was a minimum of 5500 well armed troops. What did he get? He got his troops cut back from the 2000 or so he started with. This book was real eye opener into the world of the UN who I used to hold in high regard.

What happened in Rwanda was an atrocity and could have been stopped. As world powers go around tooting their horns about spreading democracy, giving people freedom, protection, and peace, just remember these are the same people who said that 800,000 Rwandans are not worth saving.

Shake Hands with the Devil is a must read, and I suggest everyone read it for a very thorough and detailed account of what happened in Rwanda. The book is shocking and a bit disturbing at times, but it really puts things into perspective about our global community and the need for us to take action when such events happen.

I dog eared pages in this book whenever I came across a good quote, now having finished the book I realize IU have probably 30-40 odd pages dog eared. The following is a list of quotes I found exceptionally telling on second reading:

“What I have come to realize as the root of it all, however, is the fundamental indifference of the world community to the plight of seven to eight million black Africans in a tiny country that had no strategic or resource value to any world power. An overpopulated little country that turned in on itself and destroyed its own people, as the world watched and yet could not manage to find the political will to intervene. Engraved still in my brain is the judgment of a small group of bureaucrats who came to “asses” the situation in the first weeks of the genocide: “We will recommend to our governments not to intervene as the risks are high and all that is here are humans.””

“You know, soldiers are very unusual people. On the outside, they are the hardest, most demanding people, but underneath that, they are the most human, the most feeling, the most emotionally attached people who exist.” – Dallaires father

“In Canada, ‘French’ and ‘English’ are our first names. Our surname is ‘Canadian’. We must be true to our heritage, but we must also be true to our first name as it is our individuality, our soul, and we must not have any inferiority or superiority complex.” – Jean Lesage

“Nights in Kigali and in central Africa are usually extremely dark. The city usually shuts down at last light. I found African nights a startling contrast between peace and quiet, darkness and danger.”

“I remember that I settled back in my seat with some satisfaction as our plane left Africa. AI felt that I had worked very hard and had come up with a mission plan that could work. I had taken into account all the major political feedback from all the major players of the Arusha process. Real peace and contentment washed over me. I truly not realize that the devil was already afoot.”

“The future of UNAMIR’s participation in implementing the Arusha Peace Agreement was being decided by fifteen men sitting in a backroom beside the Security Council hall in New York, one of whom was a hardline Rwandan extremist. He found himself allied with the Americans, Russians and Chinese, who all wanted the mission to end. On the morning of April 6, we received the Security Council’s Resolution 909, which extended our mandate for six weeks… The report sent the wrong message, and the consequences were truly devastating. It confirmed for all Rwandans-the moderates attempting to hang on to hope and the extremists plotting extermination-that the world didn’t give a damn about Rwanda.”

“It was the end of the first day of a hundred-day civil war and a genocide that would engulf all of us in unimaginable carnage.”

“I passed by an assembly point where French soldiers were loading expatriates into vehicles. Hundreds of Rwandans had gathered to watch all these white entrepreneurs, NGO staff and their families making their fearful exits, and as I wended my way through the crowd, I saw how aggressively the French were pushing black Rwandans seeking asylum out of the way. A sense of shame overcame me. The whites, who had made their money in Rwanda and who had hired so many Rwandans to be their servants and labourers, were now abandoning them. Self-interest and self-preservation ruled.”

“In Gisenyi, a tourist town on Lake Kivu, an Austrian MILOB reported a festive spirit on the part of the killers, who seemed oblivious to the sheer horror and pandemonium as they cut down men, women and children in the streets. In Kobungo, government soldiers were running a scorched earth policy against Tutsis and Hutu moderates. In parts of Kigali, bulldozers had been broght in to dig deeper trenches at the roadblocks to reduce the piles of bodies. Prisoners in their pink jail uniforms were picking up corpses and throwing them into dump trucks to be hauled away. Think of that for a moment:there were so many dead that they had to be laded into dump trucks.”

“I can’t tell you how disgusting daily life could be; the corpse-eating dogs that we shot on sight now had no qualms about attacking the living.”

“After I got home from Rwanda, and the years slowly revealed to me the extent of the cynical maneuvering by France, Belgium, the United States, and the RPF and the RGF, among others, I couldn’t help but feel that we were a sort of diversion, even sacrificial lambs, that permitted statesmen to say that the world was doing something to stop the killing. In fact we were nothing more than camouflage.”

“To my mind, their crimes had made them inhuman, turned them into machines made of flesh that imitated the motions of being human.”

“The Interahamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death but, while they were still alive, they would cut off the private parts and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents, who would then be murdered with slightly greater dispatch.” –Shaharyar Khan taken from The Shallow Graves of Rwanda

And so for the last weeks of my command the Americans, with all their resources, sat inside the perimeter of the Kigali airport, and though they helped us bring our troops in and out, they did little else.”

“…during those last weeks we received a shocking call from an American staffer…He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier. It was a macabre, to say the least.”

“Let there be no doubt: the Rwandan genocide was the ultimate responsibility of those Rwandans who planned, ordered, supervised and eventually conducted it. Their extremism was the seemingly indestructible and ugly harvest of years of power struggles and insecurity that had been deftly played upon by their former colonial rules.”

“Still, at its heart the Rwandan story is the story of the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people.
The international community, of which the UN is only a symbol, failed to move beyond self-interest for the sake of Rwanda. While most nations agreed that something should be done they all had an excuses why they should not be the ones to do it. As a result, the UN was denied the political will and material mean to prevent the tragedy.”

“How do we pick and choose where to get involved? Canada and other peacekeeping nations have become accustomed to acting if, and only if, international public opinion will support them – a dangerous path that leads to a moral relativism in which a country risks losing sight of the difference between good and evil, a concept that some players on the international stage view as outmoded.”

“What is the reason for this marche seul by the developed nations? IN the last decades of the twentieth century, self-interest, sovereignty and taking care of number one became the primary criteria for any serious provision of support or resources to the globe’s trouble spots. If the country in question is of any possible strategic value to the world powers, then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the order of the day.”

“But many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.”

I finished the Da Vinci Code about a couple month ago after finally getting a copy. I received the special illustrated version for Christmas after mentioning it to my parents once or twice. I had only heard a little bit about the book, I wasn’t even sure if it was a novel or a non-fiction, all I knew was that it was on the best sellers lists for months on end and it had mentioned the number Phi and the golden equation a few times. Right away despite the forward saying that most of what was presented in the novel was fact I realized this book was a piece of fiction. With that said also right away I was drawn into the book and had trouble putting it down.

The Da Vinci Code takes place in Europe over the course of a day or two. It is a wild tail of a symbolist who gets flung into the middle of a holy grail search that starts in the Louvre in Paris France. Having been to the Louvre it made it easy to identify with much of what the author was trying to build visually. The Da Vinci Code deals a lot with Art, history and the symbolism found therein. Having the Special Illustrated Version was excellent because you could see right in front of you exactly what the characters in the novel were talking about as all the art, buildings and other items being discussed are displayed tastefully throughout the novel.

I think the reason The Da Vinci Code became so popular is because of the many conspiracy theories Dan Brown presents, especially since most of them revolve around the Catholic Church, who better a target these days? While Dan Brown says everything relating to the Church, Symbolism and other facts in the novel are all true I really had to question much what was being presented. He doesn’t do much to backup his facts either, but rather uses arguments like “Who are you going to believe, a group that molests young boys, or me?”. However, despite this small problem in his facts I still quite enjoyed this book. It moved along at a break neck speed, and was a very entertaining read once I got past the fact that this book is purely fiction.

While this book is labeled as fiction it has caused quite a controversy, and a new wave of tourists hitting up Europe to see all the locations found in the book. Groups like the Catholic Church, the Opus Diea, the Stone Masons have all released press releases calling out the misinformation surrounding this book, not to mention all the churches and historical locations in Europe that have had to put up signs telling tourists to stop wasting there time.

Overall I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, and recommend it to anyone who is looking for an exciting book that mixes in some beautiful art and culture into the story. I also highly recommend that if you are to read this book you get the illustrated version as it allows you to see right away exactly what the characters in the novel are talking about.

Took me a while to read this book, as usually happens when I am reading non-fiction. I started the book a few months ago then got side tracked with a few other books but started back into it a couple weeks ago and blazed through the rest of the book quite fine. Before reading this book I already knew missile defense was bad, however now having read the book I can fully understand the extent of how bad it is. Most of this book is quotes taken from very respectable sources, which are all footnoted. The main theme of the book is the following:

• Missile defense does not work now and will likely never work and it is a huge waste of money.
• Canada would have no role or say in how this project gets developed whether we sign onto it or not.
• It is a way for the US to get first strike weapons into space in the continuation of their goals of dominating space.
• It will likely cause a new arms race with Russia, China, Pakistan, India etc.
• Efforts and money should be spent on anti-proliferation and the destruction of nuclear weapons rather than building new weapons.

When reading this book about midway through I started dog-earing pages that had quotes I really enjoyed. To finish off this review I will leave you with the quotes I liked from the book.

“It’s impossible to imagine any circumstances in which some suicidal dictator would heave a nuclear missile at the U.S. – a feat that’s exceptionally difficult to do in itself – while knowing that minutes later he himself would be vaporized in a mushroom-shaped cloud.
Terrorists

are quite another matter. If and when they ever acquire weapons of mass destruction, they’ll try to slip them in by ship or by truck. Against such a threat, the U.S.’s anti-missile program is irrelevant, which is to say it’s a gigantic boondoggle.” – Toronto Star, September 22, 2002

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Perhaps most important, we can improve the image of the United States by directing some of the money spent on unneeded weapons at increased foreign aid. The United States spends less on foreign assistance as a percentage of gross domestic product than any other industrial nation – less than one-third that of Germany, one-fifth that of France and one-ninth that of Denmark.” – James L. Hecht

“It is evident that NMD points the world down the wrong path … Unchecked, weapons and counter weapons lead only to the development of further weapons… The international control of armament offers the only protection for the weak, as for the mighty. But dare we tell the emperor that he has no clothes? It would be an act of friendship were we to do so.” – globeandmail.com, May 7, 2003

“According to World Band President James Wolfensohn, world defence spending amounts to around $900 billion a year, while total foreign aid is only about $60 billion. ‘That seems to me the most nonsensical thing you can imagine.’” – Yahoo News, April 27, 2004

“With the deployment of NMD, an international reaction will most likely result in a new arms race. With the continuation of these trends, the tragic consequences of the Cold War, which ended in 1990, will only worsen with a second Cold War at the dawn of the 21st century. If continued spending on weapons increases and expands under NMD and TMD, nationally and internationally, there will be a corresponding depletion of human capital, as social programs and investments in health, education, and welfare, are cut even deeper. This, in turn, will result in the inevitable widening of circles of poverty and a growing gap between the haves- and the have-nots. Such an outcome will probably produce revolts, revolutions, and rising levels of terrorism around the globe.” – Terrence Edward Paupp

“We must create worldwide law and law enforcement as we outlaw worldwide war and weapons… For peace is not solely a matter of military or technical problems – it is primarily a problem of politics and people. And unless man can match his strides in weaponry and technology with equal strides in social and political development, our great strength, like that of the dinosaur, will become incapable of proper control – and like the dinosaur, vanish from the earth. As man’s new domain – outer space… The new horizons of outer space must not b e driven by the old bitter concepts of imperialism and sovereign claims. The cold reaches of the universe must not become the new arena of an even colder war.” – John F. Kennedy

“Given U.S. intransigence, other nuclear weapon-states appear to be reevaluating the need for such weapons. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the rest of the world, the vast majority of the international community, to stand up now and tell all of our military leaders that we refuse to be threatened or protected by nuclear weapons. We refuse to live in a world of continually recycled fear and hatred. We refuse to see each other as enemies. We refuse to co-operate in our own annihilation.
We demand here and now that… regardless of any nations that may oppose it, there be a call for the de-alerting of all nuclear weapons, for unequivocal action towards dismantling and destroying all nuclear weapons with a clearly stipulated timetable, and for negotiations on a universal Nuclear Weapons Convention establishing a verifiable and irreversible regime for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.” Tadatoshi Akiba, Mayor of Hiroshima

“Asked to opine about what I think is one or two of the biggest issues facing us in the coming decades might be, I find myself needing to quote Arundhati Roy, in her anti-nuclear polemic The End of Imagination. Roy writes, “There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people… and made passionately, eloquently and knowledgeably.” She goes on to say, however, that she is “prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible.” – Jody Williams

“As Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement has said, emotions without action are irrelevant. If you do not take action to make the world the place you want, it really doesn’t matter what you feel.” – Jody Williams

“The reality is that any country that is capable of building a long-range missile and has the motivation to launch it against the United States would also have the capability and motivation to build effective countermeasures to the planned defense. To assume otherwise is to base defense planning on wishful thinking.” – Physicist David Wright and Theodore Postol of MIT

This book is very easy to read, and much like Life of Pi it is more about what you take from the book than the story being told. It is filled with fables about life and following your dream. It is very simple but at the same time provokes your thought and your will to do what it is you really want to do in life. It has been translated from Spanish into 56 other languages and is a major best seller. This book is quite small so there is no reason not to read it.

Another Canadian book, actually both this and A Fine Balance were written by Indian immigrants now turned Canadians, I don’t know why that matters other than that they both are excellent authors. The Life of Pi is about life and how you live it interlaced with an amazing story. You could simply read this book as it is literally and enjoy a fantastic story, but there is so much in this book that you can apply to life, that is so inspiring that makes it so much more. Lastly this book contains nice insights into human nature and behavior that makes it all the more enjoyable to read. The Life of Pi is an easy read and will be done before you know it.

Takes place in the 1970’s during the Emergency era of India. It is an excellent tale of how several people’s lives get intertwined and how people can come together and help each other out when they are in need. This book lifts you up then brings you way down, then up a little bit, then way down again. Just when you feel things are going to be going well for the characters things take adverse turns for the worse. If you don’t like depressing novels then this is probably not for you, however I thought it presented a ray of hope at the end, but I suppose even that is really up to the reader to decide.

It is a pretty thick book but definitely worth the read.

If you want to read one mans tale about the Rwandan genocides this is a good book to read. It was written by a Canadian journalist who is basically telling his story about his time in Rwanda during the genocides. It is written as fiction but quite a lot of it is fact other than a few name changes. This book is very graphic, very depressing at times, and sometimes can come off as being a bit preachy but all in all it is one man telling his account of what was an immense tragedy. This book
deals a lot with death, but through it all there is a bit of a love story, despite the dark situation it is in. Gil Courtemanche went through a lot in Rwanda and he doesn’t sugarcoat it in this novel. If you have the stomache for it it is worth the read.