The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
by Jeffrey Sachs
Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need
Disease (Hardcover)
by Sharon Moalem
The Places In Between
by Rory Stewart
I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas Hofstadter
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The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
by Jeffrey Sachs
Celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs has a plan to eliminate extreme
poverty around the world by 2025. If you think that is too ambitious
or wildly unrealistic, you need to read this book. His focus is on
the one billion poorest individuals around the world who are caught
in a poverty trap of disease, physical isolation, environmental
stress, political instability, and lack of access to capital,
technology, medicine, and education. The goal is to help these people
reach the first rung on the "ladder of economic development" so they
can rise above mere subsistence level and achieve some control over
their economic futures and their lives. To do this, Sachs proposes
nine specific steps, which he explains in great detail in The End of
Poverty. Though his plan certainly requires the help of rich nations,
the financial assistance Sachs calls for is surprisingly modest--more
than is now provided, but within the bounds of what has been promised
in the past. For the U.S., for instance, it would mean raising
foreign aid from just 0.14 percent of GNP to 0.7 percent. Sachs does
not view such help as a handout but rather an investment in global
economic growth that will add to the security of all nations. In
presenting his argument, he offers a comprehensive education on
global economics, including why globalization should be embraced
rather than fought, why international institutions such as the United
Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank need to play a
strong role in this effort, and the reasons why extreme poverty
exists in the midst of great wealth. He also shatters some persistent
myths about poor people and shows how developing nations can do more
to help themselves.
Despite some crushing statistics, The End of Poverty is a hopeful
book. Based on a tremendous amount of data and his own experiences
working as an economic advisor to the UN and several individual
nations, Sachs makes a strong moral, economic, and political case for
why countries and individuals should battle poverty with the same
commitment and focus normally reserved for waging war. This important
book not only makes the end of poverty seem realistic, but in the
best interest of everyone on the planet, rich and poor alike. --Shawn
Carkonen --
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Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease
by Sharon Moalem
From Publishers Weekly
Moalem, a medical student with a Ph.D. in neurogenetics, asks a number
of provocative questions, such as why debilitating hereditary diseases
persist in humans and why we suffer from the consequences of aging.
His approach to these questions is solidly rooted in evolutionary
theory, and he capably demonstrates that each disease confers a
selective advantage to individuals who carry either one or two alleles
for inherited diseases. But very little is new; the principles, if not
every particular, that Moalem addresses have been covered in Randolph
Nesse and George Williams's Why We Get Sick, among others. Whether he
is discussing hemochromatosis (a disorder that causes massive amounts
of iron to accumulate in individuals), diabetes or sickle cell anemia,
his conclusion is always the same: each condition offers enough
positive evolutionary advantages to offset the negative consequences,
and this message is repeated over and over. Additionally, Moalem's
endless puns and simple jokes wear thin, but his light style makes for
easy reading for readers new to this subject. (Feb.)
From Booklist
Moalem must have been the kind of child who liked to pick things up
and look at them every which way, inside and out. Why else ask whether
there is a reason for such afflictions as diabetes, sickle-cell
anemia, and antibiotic-resistant infection? Everyone knows such
ailments are a curse, a punishment, or, at minimum, bad luck--right?
On the other hand, as Moalem notes, if every living thing dances to
the same two-step imperative, survive and reproduce, then even the
diseases our increasingly homogeneous society struggles to conquer
once must have served a purpose. So, why high cholesterol? Perhaps
this tendency and myriad other diseases endured so that their hosts
might survive to reproduce, evolutionarily speaking. Maybe asking
these kinds of questions will help scientists learn how to predict who
is at risk and will lead to individualized intervention to prevent or
minimize the impacts of genetic illnesses. Fortunately for readers,
for neurogeneticist Moalem and writing collaborator Prince, fun with
words, genes, and ideas is part of the deal.
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The Places In Between
by Rory Stewart
From Publishers Weekly
We never really find out why Stewart decided to walk across
Afghanistan only a few months after the Taliban were deposed, but what
emerges from the last leg of his two-year journey across Asia is a
lesson in good travel writing. By turns harrowing and meditative,
Stewart's trek through Afghanistan in the footsteps of the
15th-century emperor Babur is edifying at every step, grounded by his
knowledge of local history, politics and dialects. His prose is lean
and unsentimental: whether pushing through chest-high snow in the
mountains of Hazarajat or through villages still under de facto
Taliban control, his descriptions offer a cool assessment of a
landscape and a people eviscerated by war, forgotten by time and
isolated by geography. The well-oiled apparatus of his writing mimics
a dispassionate camera shutter in its precision. But if we are to
accompany someone on such a highly personal quest, we want to know who
that person is. Unfortunately, Stewart shares little emotional
background; the writer's identity is discerned best by inference.
Sometimes we get the sense he cares more for preserving history than
for the people who live in it (and for whom historical knowledge would
be luxury). But remembering Geraldo Rivera's gunslinging escapades,
perhaps we could use less sap and more clarity about this troubled and
fascinating country.(May)
From Booklist
Stewart, a resident of Scotland, has written for the New York Times
Magazine and the London Review of Books, and he is a former fellow at
Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In January 2002,
having just spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and
Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul.
Although the Taliban had been ousted several weeks earlier, Stewart
was launching a journey through a devastated, unsettled, and unsafe
landscape. The recounting of that journey makes for an engrossing,
surprising, and often deeply moving portrait of the land and the
peoples who inhabit it. Stewart relates his encounters with ordinary
villagers, security officials, students, displaced Taliban officials,
foreign-aid workers, and rural strongmen, and his descriptions of the
views and attitudes of those he lived with are presented in frank,
unvarnished terms. Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in
progress, and this work should help those who wish to understand the
complexities of that task. Jay Freeman
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I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas Hofstadter
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Hofstadter—who won a Pulitzer for his 1979 book,
Gödel, Escher, Bach—blends a surprising array of disciplines and
styles in his continuing rumination on the nature of consciousness.
Eschewing the study of biological processes as inadequate to the task,
he argues that the phenomenon of self-awareness is best explained by
an abstract model based on symbols and self-referential "loops,"
which, as they accumulate experiences, create high-level
consciousness. Theories aside, it's impossible not to experience this
book as a tender, remarkably personal and poignant effort to
understand the death of his wife from cancer in 1993—and to grasp how
consciousness mediates our otherwise ineffable relationships. In the
end, Hofstadter's view is deeply philosophical rather than scientific.
It's hopeful and romantic as well, as his model allows one
consciousness to create and maintain within itself true
representations of the essence of another. The book is all
Hofstadter—part theory, some of it difficult; part affecting memoir;
part inventive thought experiment—presented for the most part with an
incorrigible playfulness. And whatever readers' reaction to the
underlying arguments for this unique view of consciousness, they will
find the model provocative and heroically humane. (Mar.)
From Booklist
*Starred Review* For more than 25 years, Hofstadter has been
explaining the mystery of human consciousness through a bold fusion of
mathematical logic and cognitive science. Yet for all of the acclaim
his fusion has garnered (including the Pulitzer for his Godel, Escher,
Bach, 1979), this pioneer admits that few readers have really grasped
its meaning. To dispel the lingering incomprehension, Hofstadter here
amplifies his revolutionary conception of the mind. A repudiation of
traditional dualism--in which a spirit or soul inhabits the body--this
revolutionary conception defines the mind as the emergence of a neural
feedback loop within the brain. It is this peculiar loop that allows a
stream of cognitive symbols to twist back on itself, so creating the
self-awareness and self-integration that constitute an "I." Hofstadter
explains the dynamics of this reflective self in refreshingly lucid
language, enlivened with personal anecdotes that translate arcane
formulas into the wagging tail on a golden retriever or the smile on
Hopalong Cassidy. Nonspecialists are thus able to assess the divide
between human and animal minds, and even to plumb the mental links
binding the living to the dead. Hofstadter's analysis will not
convince all skeptics. But even skeptics will appreciate the way he
forces us to think deeper thoughts about thought.