Richard Belliveau
Book Review
The Crisis of Islam
Bernard Lewis
(Modern Library 2003)
What Went Wrong
Bernard Lewis
(Oxford University Press, 2002)
In recent years, an understanding of the nature of Islam has become increasingly important in the everyday lives of North Americans and western Europeans, not only because of Al-Qaeda terrorist activities in the name of Islam, but also because our pluralist societies are increasingly poly-cultural as well as multi-racial. We saw recently in Ontario how a proposed role for Shari’ a law tribunals in relation to civil courts caused a mini-crisis in government.
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Auschwitz
Report by Primo Levi and Leonardo de Benedetti.
This report was commissioned by Soviet authorities as a description of life in the camp, and it is the first thing that Levi wrote about his experience in Auschwitz. The Report describes the transport by train for four days from Italy, general life in the camp, and perhaps because Benedetti was a medical doctor, much of the short piece focuses on medical conditions and illnesses. One can clearly see information and incidents that Levi expanded upon in his later books about the camp and life afterwards. Levi and Benedetti survived the camp together, made their way back to Italy through a long and tortuous route, and remained life-long friends.
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Pierre Beemans
Hard Passage, by Arthur Kroeger
University of Alberta Press, Edmonton, 2007. 269 pp.
There are several good reasons to head down to the library (or the bookstore) to pick up a copy of this book, especially if you are a former civil servant in Ottawa.
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A Patagonian sailing adventure
I first became a fan of Nick Coghlan’s writing when reading his dispatches from our embassy in Colombia in the late nineties. In these reports, he combined the two qualities that make “Winter in Fireland” a gripping read – an irrepressible spirit of adventure which took him into the most daunting situations, and an ability to describe his experiences in lucid prose. This book, following on his previous publications about Colombia and Sudan, places him solidly in the company of the best travel writers - those hardy souls who have explored the world’s nether regions and lived to tell the tale.
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Paul Durand
Published in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in Spanish by Fundacion Cultural Dominicana in 2011.
The Author
One could not find a better chronicler than John W. Graham to interpret the political events that rocked the Dominican Republic in 1994. A career diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service,
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Paul Durand
Robert Fowler has written a unique account of what it is to be a captive of Al Queda. Unique, because Fowler is the highest-level representative of western governments ever to be taken by Al Queda. Also, because his background as a diplomat, senior government official and UN representative was precisely keyed to the menace of islamist terrorism; he knows his subject.
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Roger Noriega
Because I am arguably one of the “right-wing” Americans whom many of the co-authors of “Our Place in the Sun” deride, it might disappoint them to know that I enjoyed their incisive, candid descriptions of Canada’s engagement of Cuba during the last 50-plus years.
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Jean-Pierre Juneau
J’ai été intéressé par les commentaires de Roger Noriega. Cet ancien responsable des affaires latino-américaines au Département d’État exprime certains points de vue avec lesquels je suis d’accord, mais pour ce qui concerne la Révolution cubaine, il faut bien avoir à l’esprit qu’en politique comme en physique, il n y a pas d’effets sans causes.
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Pierre Beemans
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt. Pantheon Books, NY, 2012, 420 pp.
In this highly readable and stimulating book Jonathan Haidt sets out and justifies his Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and how it applies to the current socio-cultural and political environment in the USA. MFT postulates that humans in all societies are governed by six instinctive responses in their relations to their ‘moral environment’ and that these six responses are essential to a healthy balance both in the collective social order and in the individual’s engagement in society.
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John Klassen
LEO PERUTZ
Leo Perutz (1882-1957) was a Jewish Czech -Austrian writer. More Austrian than Czech; he moved from Prague at 7; lived in Vienna until the ? Anschluss when he moved to Palestine; returned to Austria occasionally in the 1950s; died visiting friends in Austria in 1957. Perutz is said to have been admired as a writer by Borges, Calvino, Ian Fleming, and Graham Greene.
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