This and that

I have a bunch of books knocking around, some of which I've finished and others that I thought I'd like but can't get into.

Pnin Vladimir NABOKOV
Some Die of Heartbreak Saul BELLOW

For better or worse I can't get past the first few pages of these guys. The first gives a lengthy description of a Russian professor lost on a train trip and the second, well, I haven't really figured it out.

Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel GARCIA MARQUEZ

I loved this book and should have read it years ago. I am told that his better known Solitude volume is more difficult to get through, but Cholera put me in a kind of trance. After learning from the jacket that it was about a man who waits 50 years for his sweetheart's husband to die, I was skeptical, but changed my mind soon enough. This book luxuriates in description, and is particularly intoxicating for someone who has never visited Latin America. Essential reading, I think.

Life of Pi Yann MARTEL

Another book that I never got around to reading when it came out, and appropriate after my taste of Garciamarquesian magic realism. Like Cholera its plot centres on an interminable wait, although the protagonist is in a life raft rather than an ancient colonial capital. There is a lot of musing on religion and zoology--an unlikely but workable combination--although I didn't find myself pondering the issues raised as deeply or with as much interest as the author might have intended. I liked it most of all for being a really good story.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince J.K. ROWLING

I think someone already has dibs on this review, so I'll just say that I devoured it in one night and agree with many reviewers that this is the darkest Potter book yet.

World on Fire Amy CHUA

I was skeptical when I first saw this book. Everything about it--from its sensationalist title to its impossibly broad geographical and theoretical scope--made me expect something in the line of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, subject of much bashing in undergraduate discussion sections the world over. The subtitle reads "How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." For Chua, economic liberalization concentrates wealth in the hands of a select few. This isn't novel, but Chua makes the less popular point that these few tend to hail from ethnic minorities. When democratization occurs alongside economic liberalization--a peculiar combination that is unique to our post-Cold War times-- it empowers the poorer ethnic majority. When a hated minority controls the economy and the majority dominates the political institutions, ethnic conflict can break out.

Chua's presentation is fairly sound, in large part due to her modesty. The book's approach is not social scientific in the sense of explaining why her forces interact as they do, and addressing variations in the intensity of ethnic conflict and the inequality of economic development. Chua is content to identify the problem and let others flesh out the fuller causal picture. For this reason her theory evades criticism as overly parsimonious--or, as the theoretical purist's favourite euphemism has it, "elegant"--to capture the universe of complex factors at work here.

Then again, Chua's is just one perspective on two multifaceted forces. There are arguments for each of the following hypotheses:

• economic liberalization leads to political liberalization;
• economic liberalization retards political liberalization;
• political liberalization leads to economic liberalization;
• political liberalization retards economic liberalization;
  

all of which are probably true to different extents. No one has a decent idea of the net result we get after all these pull in their directions. Chua writes of what happens when both are introduced at the same time, but is less concerned with the more interesting question of how the two affect each other. Perhaps this kind of account would tell us more about the variations in the severity of her vision.

Powerbook APPLE COMPUTER

This is my favourite book of all. Forgive the gratuitous Mac shot at the beginning of this post -- I am a longtime Mac lover who has only recently taken the buying plunge and I've got many years of cooped-up Machead nerdiness to release.