First of all, while wishing all TMID readers and editorial staff the best for the New Year, please allow me to express a word of strong solidarity with my friend Alfred Sant and his family. I am confident that political friends and foes will join me in doing so at this particular moment.
It was bad enough that I ended up writing about politics on Christmas eve in another section of the local media, so although a lot has happened in the past few weeks, in spite of not being a traditionalist by nature, I have decided to stick to tradition and go over a few books that impressed me most throughout the past year, most of which I strongly recommend to the readers.
The age of Turbulence – Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan is no doubt the best book I read last year. In spite of his 18-year tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the man is brilliant on three counts – for his sense of his history, for his vision about the future (in spite of his venerable age) and most important of all, for his sense of humour and knack for admitting and identifying his personal weaknesses and shortcomings. Such virtues do not come easy to most politicians I know.
The most dramatic part of the book is no doubt the opening chapter, which describes what he went through on 9/11 – the sharpest conclusion being that long before his flight touched down, he had concluded that the world was about to change in ways that he could not yet define and that the complacency “we Americans” had embraced for the decade following the end of the cold war had just been shattered.
His love and respect for Gerald Ford was out of this world. Especially when he reveals that although what cost Ford the 1976 election was the presidential pardon he had granted Nixon, as the years passed, many prominent Democrats came to believe that Ford’s pardon had been essential to getting the trauma of Watergate behind the American people. Even if you are not into economics or finance read it for its strong human touch! As for his humour he reminded me of a more refined Walter Matthau!
The Blair years – The Alastair Campbell Diaries. Although this must be one of the most self-indulgent books that I have read, and am sure that I will find Blair Unbound by Anthony Sheldon to be a far better and more thoroughly researched and objective account of the Blair years, it is a compulsive read in its own schizophrenic way. Some friends found it exhausting, which indeed it is, but it is also exhaustive in its riveting style and detail crammed content as well as the way it has depicted “politics in the raw.” Gossip no doubt abounds, but local spin doctors and control freaks should consider this a must as our own electoral countdown fast approaches.
He quotes The Sun describing his lot as the most arrogant government in history. So much I cannot tell, but as far as he is or was concerned I could but not agree more. A special tribute should be given to Richard Stott who edited a manuscript that is reported to have been four times as long as the final version!
In another day and age Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine – The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism would have easily been dismissed as a Marxist diatribe. But in an era when globalisation has run wild, one finds himself deeply engrossed in her biting assessment, even if some or arguably most of her conclusions are over the top. To her mind every man-made or nature-made disaster is a golden opportunity, so much so that she ends up attributing the commercial exploitation of the New Orleans flooding to 93-year-old Milton Friedman’s support whom she describes as “the grand guru for the movement of unfettered capitalism”.
No government or regime is spared – from the PRC government to Chile in Pinochet days. She singles out Friedman as the arch villain of the piece because she claims that he first learnt how to exploit a large scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet.
For her tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation are all anathema. She claims to have started researching the free market’s dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. Her conclusion is almost over simplistic – for mega disasters read super profits! She says so because she tends to distinguish between conventional capitalism and fundamentalist capitalism, which to her mind has always needed disasters to advance. Not exactly bedside reading, especially if you happen to be nursing a bad cold or even something worse! No doubt both Halliburton and Blackwater get far from an honourable mention. And yet with the sense of immediacy of her style of reporting no wonder that her The Nation articles are syndicated around the world!
Frank Gardner’s Blood and Sand struck a chord with me because in spite of the story of pain and agony that it portrays, there is no bitterness or anger in what he says and particularly in the way he says it. To end up virtually paralysed by Islamist extremists and yet end up continuing to love that particular part of the globe without seeing your respect for the Islamic world diminish in any way is already an achievement in itself. Even more so is the excellent warm but British manner in which he tells his true life tale. The graphic details of the drama should lead one to despair.
Instead they offer hope and his account is more often than not at once touching and moving without indulging into sentimentality. From all the books I read recently it seems to be the most compelling analysis of the ongoing war on terror although The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda’s Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright which I am still half way through – having interrupted my reading of it to catch up with Prof. de Marco’s memoirs – is perhaps less touching but definitely far more devastating and terrifying.
No wonder that apart from becoming an international best seller it has been chosen Book of the Year by leading publications from The Economist to the Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph to the New Statesman. It is basically a docu-drama but reads like a thriller and at day’s end must also be one of the best-researched books on the market too!
Three final special mentions go to Testimony by Nicolas Sarkozy; The Assault On Reason by Al Gore, and in a lighter vein The Ghost by Robert Harris.
One might agree or disagree with Sarko’s image, life style and policies but at last Europe has a leader who is distinctly different and does not care two hoots about pushing convention aside. His dream of France in the 21st Century is a must read for politicians of any political creed. Particularly since visionaries do not grow on trees. I can only imagine how uncomfortable certain stuffed shirts in Brussels must feel about his unorthodox and flamboyant approach to key issues. It remains a moot point whether he will achieve his aims or not but for his agenda there is no limit: immigration to nuclear power, globalisation to cultural chauvinism, the welfare state and education, law and order and the war on terror as well as relations with the USA and Russia and of course the Med itself!
Al Gore’s The Assault On Reason must be his 9th title so far but it also is definitely his most political one to-date. Rather than a condemnation of the Bush administration, it fits its description as “a visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism and blind faith has combined with the degradation of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason.” Having read through it, I am inclined to consider him to be one of the best Presidents the US did not have!
In a much lighter vein, Robert Harris abandons his Roman trilogies of Pompeii and Imperium to launch into a fictionalised account of a Blair clone with enough skeletons in his cupboard for the story to reach dramatic and tragic proportions. A guaranteed sit through read.
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Leo Brincat is the opposition's spokesman on Foreign Affairs and IT