Year End
December 22, 2007 — tbelfield
So much that is posted on the net which passes for news or which writers comment on in blogs would leave one with the impression that the world has gone insane. It has in many respects. And the news, especially now, is often not good. Even here, the subject being Jakarta, we have modern day slavery, corrupt government officials, bird flu, global warming and deforestation, floods, and traffic conditions so horrendous that the wealthy are now offered a commute to work by helicopter. When I came across Asia Times Online Books Review for December 22, 2007, I knew it was worth a look. I will be back in January with an updated Selamat Jakarta, new reviews, and introducing new Jakarta writers.
The secret library of hope
12 books to stiffen your resolve
Reviewed Rebecca Solnit
Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks - or building ladders - rather than staring at its unyielding expanse. It’s a worldview, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again. Dissent in the United States has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as “the secret library of hope”. None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.
That’s what books in a library of hope consist of - not a denial of the horrors of recent history, but an exploration of the other tendencies, avenues, and achievements that are too often overlooked. …> read full article here
Rebecca Solnit’s secret library of hope
Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People.
Aung San Suu Kyi, The Voice of Hope.
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.
Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations.
Richard Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us.
William Morris, News from Nowhere.
News from Nowhere Collective, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism.
Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina.
Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007.
Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All.
Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, editors (introduction Bill McKibben), Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement.
From Asia Times Online…
Rebecca Solnit blurbed a lot of books this year, wrote the foreword for Marisa Handler’s Loyal to the Sky, and provided editorial services on another book of her brother’s, this time with conscientious objector Aimee Allison: the counter-recruitment manual Army of None. Her own book for 2007 is Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, a collection of 36 essays including several that first appeared as Tomdispatches. She is the author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.
My own reading at the year end is Sidelines: Thought Pieces from TEMPO Magazine, by Goenawan Mohamad, Equinox Publishing, Indonesia (2005) and translated by Jennifer Lindsay. Goenawan Mohamad assisted founding Tempo and was editor there from 1971 to 1994 when it was banned from publishing by the Soeharto government. After the ban, as he states in the author’s note, “In the weeks that followed, protests against the clampdown were voiced in various places all over Indonesia. The situation was not widely understood, however, because the government censored all news about it.
Nevertheless, the level of protest was unprecedented, and made me aware that if Tempo offered something of worth for Indonesian society, it was clearly related to the need for freedom of expression”.
These “thought pieces” are exquisite essays on a wide array of subjects from history, philosophy, literature, politics, and of course, Jakarta. They are well worth the time reading and contemplating.
