Books 4.0

Sorry for the delay in posting this. In April I started several books (5, in fact), but for various reasons, I hadn't finished them by the end of the month. Anyway, since I was a bit behind on blog posts, it made sense to put this one off. I managed to finish all these books by the first week of May, so I think it's fair.

**** The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I wasn't sure what to expect from this book, but I was really impressed by the writing. He is able to take a historical situation (WWII) and write a compelling fictional narrative. In fact, it is clear that he had researched all of his topics (an incredibly wide range) extensively and wanted the experiences to be as genuine as possible. His style of writing takes a bit of effort to read, but he tells the story very well. I really enjoyed reading the book, although it had a slight taint from high school English. I never read it there, but several of my friends did, and I remembered snippets of them overanalyzing topics until you found things that weren't there (because that was most of what I remember from high school english).

***** Mastering the Machine Revisited by Ian Smillie. This book was the textbook for D-Lab I, although first semester senior year was a bit hectic so I didn't get the chance to absorb a whole lot from the book. Anyway, the book is a really detailed look at fighting poverty, but instead of talking about economics and aid, the book focuses a lot on technology/engineering and the social and cultural aspects behind it. It has copious evidence to back up all of the points and is generally a pretty easy read. I strongly recommend it to people who want to learn a bit more about some things that make development projects succeed and some things that make them fail.

** Forest Farming by J. Sholto Douglas. I was really excited when I got this book. It's from the same series as the Rainwater Harvesting and Biogas Programme books (which I both really liked). Also, it has an introduction written by Schumacher, so that is an automatic plus. Unfortunately, past that, the book was rather disappointing. The authors argued heavily that all of the world's problems will be solved if we just get more trees in the ground. They didn't really discuss things like social constraints, economic trade-offs, cultural issues, politics or any of the many other reasons that things just aren't as simple as they make them seem. Still, there was some useful (though rather encyclopedic) information on different types of trees. Still, they completely avoid the topic of pragmatism. I did really like a quotation they included: Les forets precedent les civilisations; les deserts les suivent. (I don't feel like including accents/diacritical marks.)