* 1 *

Stig Holmquist: The dictator's gaze. Robert Mugabe – from freedom hero to dictator

The liberation fighter Robert Mugabe was an important revolutionary icon for the 68s. His struggle against Prime Minister Ian Smith and the white settlers of Rhodesia stood as the most important and visible symbol of political liberation from European colonialization of Africa at the time.

The very framework of the fight in Rhodesia was media-friendly and easy to follow: A captive African-African rebel leads the fight against white settlers who control a rich and fertile part of Africa. The white settlers end up being expelled and the land distributed to poor Africans. It was easy to get sympathy with the new Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe. He became a revolutionary icon.

Holmquist's book is a must for Norwegian aid workers.

Holmquist's book is very readable and a "must" for Norwegian aid workers to join the new phase that Zimbabwe is now entering. It is also a useful reminder and introduction to today's Africa, at a time when African issues are again being pushed into background in the Norwegian media in favor of foreign policy issues related to Trump, Putin, Iran, China and North Korea.

The book is also interesting to those of us who believed in Mugabe and paid tribute to him 40 years ago. Many of us may benefit from a self-critical look back

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* 2 *

Navid Kermani: Along the graves

It is easy to understand that businesses that make a living selling goods have to think about profits and that publishers of cultural products shy away from unsafe cards. Therefore, it is sensational that a news magazine like Der Spiegel chooses to invest money, time and crew on a book project that will allow the journey from Cologne to Isfahan in Iran, and which deals with one rather ill-advised theme after another: Chernobyl, refugees, genocide, xenophobia, the Soviet era's backwater ... The explanation is that the Spiegel boss found the only believer to carry this dare, ending with Spiegel's bestseller list: German-Iranian Navid Kermani.

How integrated can immigrants be? A yardstick could be the golden day of 2014 when the German parliament (Bundestag) asked Kermani to hold the party speech on the 65 anniversary of the German Constitution, in front of a hard-fought congregation stirring tears. Or when Bundes president Gauck was to step down, and Kermani was among the people he could pull off as possible heir – to the highest office in Germany.

Navid Kermani is strictly no immigrant, his parents came from Iran to Germany before Navid was born, but he makes regular trips to Isfahan, and here lies the seed of the book Along the Graves ("Along the Graves"). And Spiegel's venture also seems somewhat less risky by focusing on a reputable author, who has won German booksellers' Peace Prize and the Princess Margriet Award for Culture 2017.

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* 3 *

Catherine Hartmann: The Green Lie

If all humans on the planet were to live and consume in the same way as in rich countries, we would need three planets. This is what the researchers agree. Between 1980 and 2010, consumption of plant minerals and fossil raw materials has doubled, from 40 to 80 billion tonnes. Forests are being cut down, biodiversity is shrinking, land is eroding, greenhouse gases are increasing, and hunger is growing. How can it happen if more and more goods are "organic"?

In the book The Green Lie author Kathrin Hartmann gives us proof and analysis of the thesis: "Greenwashing" stands up to all attempts at clarification. The more knowledgeable the target group, the more harmful the product, the more absurd the promises, the bigger the lie in other words, the more willing it is to be received. In this way, the exploitation of resources is disguised with a "sustainable" cloak. How is this kind of scam possible?

The consumer is convinced by green fake news and gets the feeling of contributing to a better world.

Nestlé is one of many companies that invokes a program for "sustainable" coffee. It is not about organic farming or fair trade, but it sounds good, the coffee farmer smiles widely on the websites, the consumer is convinced by green fake news and gets the feeling of contributing to a better world.

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* 4 *

Peter Norman Waage: André Bjerke: In the joy of the fight

Finally, the great biography of André Bjerke is out! It is an event many people will enjoy. Bjerke has a secure place as an outstanding cultural communicator and cultural creator in the Norwegian post-war period, and in Waage's biography he is very much able to speak for himself. That's a good grip: Bjerke kept a diary throughout much of his life. The book is steeped in great respect and love for Bjerk's art and personality. His poems and renditions are well known to most, but how many have read his essayism, his criticism of Newtonian optics or his introduction to Goethe's color theory? Also this side of Bjerkes production allows his cinema to get to know us.

The polemic who goes crazy, but who never fails verbally, the competitor and the energetic poet. And above all, a golden humor shines.

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* 5 *

Pablo Neruda (Translated by Peer Sibast): Hundreds of love sonnets

In the collection of poems written as a tribute to his beloved Matilde, Pablo Neruda notes in the preface: “With great humility I have prepared these sonnets of wood; I gave them the sound of this opaque and pure substance, and it is so, they should reach your ears. Walking in the woods or on the sandy beach, along hidden lakes, on ash-gray stretches, you and I have collected pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood, which were exposed to the irregularities of the water and the weather. ”

A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines of particular logical-rhetorical construction with the premise described in the first quarter (four lines), which in a pictorial form expands in the second and often the third quarter, and then culminates in a concluding or concluding part. Despite the logical structure of the sonnets, Neruda's sonnets are experienced as a thoughtful poetic dialogue he engages with himself, his wife and the Chilean people.

"The loneliness, give me the seal of your unceasing spring,
the unremarkable path of the cruel birds
and the throbbing heart that precedes
the honey, the music, the sea, the birth. "

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* 6 *

Mary Beard: Women & Power. A manifesto

In the sixties a publication entitled SCUM manifesto was published. SCUM stood for the Society for Cutting Up Men and was a call to demolish society and eliminate men. The author received limited attention until she tried to kill the pop art artist Andy Warhol. It turned out to be excellent marketing, albeit dubious support for serious feminists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett. Some decades have passed. Now the women's battle has found new fronts, and on Hollywood's main stage, a black-clad Oprah Winfrey with the statement: "Time's up." For the abusers. Really?

Women and power are a short story. Women's silence has a millennial tradition.

What is typical of women's long history of suffering? Popular British philologist, author and speaker Mary Beard has come up with a little book titled Women & Power. A Manifesto. The subtitle is a snap to SCUM, and the book makes great success. Beard asks the question: What is typical of women's long history of suffering? Her toolbox contains examples from our millennial Greco-Roman tradition, a tradition that has allowed women to perfect their sacrificial role from the very beginning. Beard starts with a scene: A queen watches a group of men's lament over the many trials of war and warrior. She takes the floor and asks them to switch to a less depressing topic, whereupon the son reprimands her: "Mother," he says, "go back to your room and continue your work of weaving and spinning. [...] Speech is the cause of men, all men, and mine most of all, for in this house is I the one who has the power. ”And the queen walks away. Their names are Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, and Telemakos, their son. The work is the Odyssey, Homer's famous hero epic from almost three thousand years back.

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* 7 *

Find Jensen: The man in town. Henry Miller and Modernism

The story of Henry Miller's life and authorship is the story of a man who travels into the heart of modern life – the thieves of Paris, the arts, the city, the anonymity, the loneliness – taking the best of it and using the insight to spot entirely new sides of existence. What begins with norm violations, anarchy and looseness ends as a matter of finding new spirituality, a creative force, a new language, a way of life.

"We need a blood transfusion." "The culture is dying because it only sees life in a linear progression." that which nourishes the creative. From the Cancer circle of friends, Miller is taking the decisive step, to turn pleasure into something creative. Creating is about giving way to what passes through one's self: a line, a rhythm, a color, investing oneself in the slightest movement. For Miller, as he swims, fucks, hikes or senses the ancient temples. Enjoyment as surplus, as cosmic rejoicing. To be the spirit of the movement. An operation against a movement larger than ourselves, as the author Finn Jensen writes. Only in this way can we, according to Miller, build a belief in being able to change life.

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* 8 *

Kristin Storrusten: maternity

Before we become parents for the first time – what do we really know about parenting? About pregnancy, childbirth and maternity? About the choices we have to make? Mostly nothing.

The training you get / Food, clean diapers, cuddle, sleep It's all / So, off you go! / Oh true, did we forget to tell you that you work in shared shifts and eternal guard? The trade union for maternity women / never signed the cooperation agreement

These lines wrote Kristin Storrusten while her baby was crying. Storrusten tells the newspapers that the Brussels poems are autobiographical and written in birth depression. But what is birth depression? Maybe it's melancholy? Maybe it's the grief of losing one in becoming a parent? That something is over, that something else is beginning. Change is not the strongest part of man. We enjoy the best when everything is as it always has been – with routines and the predictable.

If one is discouraged by giving life, by nurturing life; When moving the genealogy on is difficult, what is one to think about life and the world and the meaning of everything? Yes – one might think that it should be possible to enjoy it, and that the frames around birth and maternity time still have room for improvement.

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* 9 *

Jim Robbins (Translated by Gunnar Nyquist): The wonderful world of birds

It is not the absence of snow that tells us that spring is coming. It is the sudden presence of birdsong. Bird song in the spring gives many a kind of lift in the chest, as if something opens up and makes room for a more airy room inside us. A room that makes us feel healthier, happier and a little more hopeful. For thinking: The birds are still here.

The book is not about the wonderful world of birds, but about what birds can do for us.

Many bird species are in sharp decline worldwide. They get fewer every year, like insects and many other animals – as a result of climate change, habitat degradation and use of pesticides and chemicals. But not yet the silent spring is here.

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* 10 *

Ian Pappe: Ten myths about Israel

Israel builds its self-understanding – and marketing of the state – on the narrative of the Jews who finally got their safe home in the "land without people", about the "Arab aggressors" and about Israel as "the only democracy in a sea of ​​despots". Strong alliances and powerful friends protect the state of Israel because of this long thread of narrative. A number of other conflicts also have links to the dispute over the small patch of land, which extends only a few kilometers from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea. In other words, "everyone" has a form about Israel and Palestine.

Paper strips Israel of democratic legitimacy.

A whole sea of ​​books have been written about this conflict, from different angles. Now comes another book, translated into Norwegian, written by Ilan Pappe, who is considered one of the three great Israeli voices among the "new" historians. These historians came on the scene just after the first intifada – the first Palestinian popular uprising, lasting from 1987 – 1993. The news shows pictures of Palestinian children and youths throwing stones at Israeli armed soldiers in tanks. Suddenly, the image of Israeli David against Arab Goliath was not so easy to maintain.

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* 11 *

Nic Cheeseman (ed.): Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shapes Political Developments

Then the book of French political scientist Jean-François Bayart L'Etat and Afrique. Let the politics you wait published in English in 1993, it quickly became an international bestseller and curriculum for African studies worldwide. The book shaped a whole generation of African scientists, whether they were political scientists, historians or anthropologists. Bayart argued that African states operated on completely different principles than states in Europe: personal relations, ethnic loyalties and traditional forms of authority, often referred to as "neo-patrimonialism", shaped and governed the African state. Formal institutions had no real influence and existed only as contentless facades. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz reinforced this understanding with the book Africa Works (1999), where they insisted that it was informal institutions – norms, (un) habits, traditional ties, ethnicity – that made Africa work.

The best book on democratization in Africa that has come in many years.

Now, finally, a little counterbalance: Nic Cheeseman has invited 16 Africanists from renowned universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, Cornell and UCLA to write the book's 13 chapters. The result offers closer 400 tightly written pages with empirically based criticism of the 90 numerical understanding of the African state. Cheeseman himself contributes a very informative and binding introduction and conclusion, describing the need to establish a new theoretical framework for understanding the African state, based on the importance of both formal and informal institutions in today's Africa.

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Good reading!