https://arab.news/n3r9h
Author: COREY ROSS
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet.
These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. “Liquid Empire” tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.
Authors: R. Key Dismukes, Benjamin A. Berman, Loukia Loukopoulos
“The Limits of Expertise” reports a study of 19 major plane accidents in which authorities found crew error to be a causal factor.
The book examines how competing task demands, ambiguity and organizational pressures interact with cognitive processes to make all experts vulnerable to characteristic forms of error, according to a review on goodreads.com.
The book identifies themes cutting across the accidents, discusses the role of chance, criticizes simplistic concepts of causality of accidents, and suggests ways to reduce vulnerability to these catastrophes.
The authors’ complementary experience allowed a unique approach to the research.
Author: Raul Gallegos
Beneath Venezuelan soil lies an ocean of crude — the world’s largest reserves —an oil patch that shaped the nature of the global energy business.
Unfortunately, a dysfunctional anti-American government controls this vast resource and has used its wealth to foster voter support, ultimately wreaking economic havoc.
“Crude Nation” reveals how mismanagement has led to Venezuela’s economic ruin and turned the country into a cautionary tale for the world.
Raul Gallegos, a former Caracas-based oil correspondent, paints a picture both vivid and analytical of the country’s economic decline, the government’s foolhardy economic policies, and the wrecked lives of Venezuelans, according to a review on goodreads.com.
Author: Larry M. Bartels
An apparent explosion of support for right-wing populist parties has triggered widespread fears that liberal democracy is facing its worst crisis since the 1930s. Democracy Erodes from the Top reveals that the real crisis stems not from an increasingly populist public but from political leaders who exploit or mismanage the chronic vulnerabilities of democracy.
In this provocative book, Larry Bartels dismantles the pervasive myth of a populist wave in contemporary European public opinion. While there has always been a substantial reservoir of populist sentiment, Europeans are no less trusting of their politicians and parliaments than they were two decades ago, no less enthusiastic about European integration.
“The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa is a posthumous collection of writings described as a fragmentary or “factless autobiography.”
It was published in 1982, 47 years after Pessoa’s death, and is considered one of the most important works of 20th-century Portuguese literature.
The book is composed of a series of short, lyrical and reflective pieces that show the narrator’s inner life, philosophy and perspective on the human condition.
The narrator is a character named Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, who Pessoa described as a semi-heteronym — a distinct persona that shares some of Pessoa’s own characteristics.
Through Soares’ ruminations, the book explores themes of loneliness, boredom, melancholy, beauty and the search for meaning in life.
The fragments range from brief observations and aphorisms to longer, more discursive passages that delve into existential questions.
The writing style is highly poetic and psychological, with Soares often analyzing his thoughts and emotions in great detail.
The book lacks a linear narrative, instead presenting a collage-like collection of impressions, musings and fragmentary experiences.
It explores several key themes that continue to resonate with modern readers.
Soares grapples with feelings of isolation, disconnection and a lack of purpose within the modern urban environment.
This theme of existential loneliness and the difficulty of finding meaning in an indifferent world speaks to the modern experience of urban anonymity and social fragmentation.
The book’s contemplation of the human condition and the struggle to derive significance from the mundane details of everyday life resonates with modern readers’ existential quests.
The book’s fragmented, non-linear structure mirrors Soares’ own sense of a fragmented, unstable identity.
This theme of the modern self as a collection of shifting perspectives and experiences, rather than a unified whole, echoes the postmodern understanding of identity.
Pessoa’s innovative use of a heteronym and his experimental, modernist literary style have cemented his reputation as one of the most influential and important Portuguese writers of the 20th century.
Many of his works have been translated and studied extensively worldwide.
Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. Tsing focuses on the rainforests of Indonesia, where in the 1980s and 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets.
