A better number

I moan sometimes about the lack of content of interest to me in magazines like the TLS and the NYRB. So today I am pleased to be able to report that about half the latest number of the NYRB - Vol.LXV, No.19 - was of interest, although, not to the point of prompting me to buy any more books. From the top.

A book about how Trump is clearing the swamp by simply not appointing the senior officials who run all kinds of important government services. The old Tory trick of starving public services of staff and money, then announcing that those services are rubbish - which they might well have become, despite the best efforts of the surviving staff - and abolishing them in favour of private contractors. Not to say gangmasters.

A clutch of books about the plight of refugees, of which the world presently has a very large number. But a review which, beyond attempting to jerk our tears, offers nothing by way of a way forward. No suggestions about how to persuade President Putin to deploy some of his vast resources of space to provide homes for these people. No recognition of the limited capacity to absorb broken people of the rich but crowded countries of western Europe. No recognition that some of these problems are self inflicted, the results of civil wars and turmoil. But there is some recognition of the front line roles of Turkey and Greece and there is a reminder that we need to learn, with much bigger waves of refugees being set to follow in the wake of global warming. With this last problem, in large part, inflicted by developed countries on developing countries.

A book about how Brazil got to where it is now, in the charge of an ex-army captain with strong views on all kinds of things. One is reminded the presidents of both the Philippines and the USA. While I was reminded that a lot more slaves went from West Africa to Brazil than went to the USA, perhaps four or five times as many, and that Brazil is now very mixed race indeed. With Wikipedia suggesting that it is a lot more mixed and a lot more complicated that this article would suggest. See reference 1.

I was also prompted to find out that Brazil has perhaps three times the population of the UK, but thirty times the space.

A beacon of hope! The Supreme Court of the US might have fallen into the clutches of the hard Republican right, but other people still have access to the constitutions and the Supreme Courts of the 51 constituent states - where it might still be possible to make progress.

For a lefty, a particularly depressing article about the prison camps of Siberia in the time of Stalin. Atrocities which went on for a long time and which killed millions of people. A book, with a lot of pages to the dollar, which appears to be a long hand version of the short hand 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', a justly famous book which appeared during my childhood.

A clutch of books about opium in the US, where use has increased massively in recent years. I share two snippets. One, there was a company called Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, which made a fortune out of misselling an opioid called OxyContin. Second, unlike tobacco and alcohol, more or less freely for sale, we really need opium. Without opium, the deaths of millions of people, most of them with cancer, would be hugely more unpleasant than they are already. No easy answers here - beyond what ought to be obvious, that criminalisation has not worked. For previous notice, see the post for New Year's Eve, 2016, at reference 2. There is also reference 4.

And lastly an article about India which was not disguised as a book review, although a couple of books do get footnotes. An article about the way that people whom we would regard as extreme Hindus have taken over the government of India and who, inter alia, are busily rewriting school history books to put a thick Hindu gloss on what should be a complicated, mixed race and mixed religion story. There might be a lot of main stream Hindus in India, but there are also 200 million people who are not, mostly Moslems, but plenty of Christians too. 200 million who are not sleeping so easy in their beds. The decent, secular traditions of Nehru and his kind seem to have been dumped. By no means the first article of this sort which I have read. See, for example, reference 3.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo_Brazilians.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/12/somewhat-depressing.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/04/burning-books.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Sackler. Following in the tradition of the very rich Americans who went before, the Sacklers launder a good chunk of their gains through genuinely charitable foundations.