Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. 10/10. A very, very great novel, a work of genius, more than comparable to War and Peace or any other of the epics. Only a Russian novel, one feels, could both have such a title and live up to it — what it is about Russian culture that enables [...]
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Read in 2000, summer vacation.
Notes[71] Tricon Global Restaurants (corp) owner Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC.
Committee for Employment Opportunities: Lobby group for chain restaurants. Chief lobbyist is Bill Signer. Lobbied, for example, to continue tax credits and subsidies given by US govt for training of workers.
[...]Trust Us We’re Experts (subtitled: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future), by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.
I haven’t yet read all of this but a couple of interesting items that caught my eye.
The Independence InstituteMany years ago when I first got interested in the Microsoft Antitrust case I remember [...]
7.5/10 The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert. Read during my trip to the IIOC. What makes this good (or rather what raises it above the pot-boiler) is precisely those elements that are not science fiction, in particular the examination of different forms of awareness and their affect on our interpretation of the effects of modernity.
Friedrich Hayek, p35, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988:
Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains – despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property – a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made.
[...]Quotations taken from Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 [Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006].
The Red TerrorOp cit. p. 87:
In all, the victims of the red terror in the Republican zone during the civil war rose to some 38,000 people, of whom almost half were killed in Madrid (8,815) [...]
9/10. Though the plot (particularly in its ‘and we lived happily ever after’ conclusion) is a little too ‘romantic’ for my tastes this is a brilliant novel with an amazing prose style: supple, rich and perfectly suited to the nature of the work.
8.5/10. Quite apart from its central (and provocative) ‘decline-of-hollywood’ thesis the endless supply of corruscating anecdote makes this book more than worth the price of admission. Rather than try and cull any samples from the panopoly of possibilities here is one single item which caught my eye because of its insight into the behaviour of [...]
This is the second volume of Skidelsky’s trilogy and takes Keynes from his resignation from the Treasury up until the publication of the General Theory (1936) and its immediate reception by the public and other economists. Though still excellent I found this a less satisfactory book that its predecessor.
This was for several reasons the [...]
7/10. Interesting, its prime feature is an exuberant richness of language that for the whole delights — though perhaps this over-ripeness becomes a little tiring as the tales wends to its close.
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Dr. Rufus Pollock is co-Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge.
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