Barbara Victor – Army of Roses (2004)

Terrorism is hard, but becomes easier when there’s a social context that encourages and aids it, such as the one Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad perfected during the second intifada, and which for a time also encouraged women to become martyrs. Victor looks into the backgrounds of these female suicide terrorists, and finds that their personal lives had been brought to a dead end, from which a socially and politically acceptable suicide appeared the natural way out.

Recommended: Yes. Victor finds the right balance between trying to understand what motivates these terrorists, and not excusing them.

Nick Cohen – You Can’t Read This Book (2012)

Censorship is bad.

Recommended: Yes, for its historical and factual sections, but Cohen is weak on ideas – he is a journalist and polemicist, not a thinker – so follow up with Frank Furedi’s less obvious On Tolerance.

Joseph B. Smith – Portrait of a Cold Warrior (1976)

A former CIA agent reveals the unimpressive reality behind their work in South-East Asia and Latin American in the 1950s and 60s. The CIA comes across as a top-heavy but at times also reckless organization whose involvement in a country could mean anything from “was the decisive factor in a coup” to “got entangled in affairs they were too stupid or arrogant to understand”.

Recommended: Yes. I respect the author’s inner conflict between believing that he is fighting the right war for the right side, and being frightened by the people who fights it alongside him.

Martin Booth – The Dragon Syndicates - The global phenomenon of the Triads (2001)

The Triads are secret societies that once served useful functions in Chinese society, but they were always closely connected with crime, and eventually this became their only purpose. It takes either a totalitarian state or unusually well-planned police actions to inhibit them, and they’re still to be found in most Chinese communities over the world.

Recommended: Weakly. Like all organized crime exposés it leans towards sensationalism. On the other hand, the myths of organized crime are often as important as the facts.

Robert Heinlein – Tunnel in the Sky (1955)

A group of youths are sent out into the wilderness to fend for themselves, and, after a brief Lord of the Flies phase, discover that democratic government is the art of living peacefully with people you don’t like.

Recommended: Yes. There’s a line in the sand, and Heinlein’s juveniles and I are on one side of it.

George Walden – The New Elites (2000)

Elites come and go. Walden argues that the elites of today are populist anti-elitists, mediocrities who condescend to the masses – the average man – from a position only slightly raised above them. We would be better off with genuine elites who are not afraid of aiming and reaching high, as long as they’re also alive and open to newcomers.

Recommended: Yes. Walden veers off into some unfocused “my country is the worst in the world” rants, but for the most part, this is an insightful analysis that applies equallywell to Norway.

Bjørn Vassnes – Sokrates & Sjøpungen (2011)

It’s ironic how little actual knowledge there is to find in this book about how nobody in Norway values knowledge any more. It’s as if Vassnes just quickly wrote down all the opinions he has about knowledge, scattering facts inbetween, but never pausing to focus on any single topic. So we jump from Norway’s PISA scores to academics who don’t like evolutionary psychology to “oh you can’t trust the newspaper these days” to how the infrastructure is failing to how the climate may collapse and kill us all – sometimes from one paragraph to the next. I probably agree with his overall message, I just can’t figure out what specifically he is trying to say most of the time. I’ve littered the margins with “Uhh…?” Which is short for: “Ah yes, this is an interesting claim, I can’t wait to see how you intend to support it – no, wait, don’t move on, not again! Please stand still for just one moment! Nooooo..” And then we’re off to how Christianity created the Dark Ages, and then to how Cloud Computing and China aren’t all that, and ..

Read: 44 pages.

Recommended: No. This may be the right book for somebody, for instance people who doen’t already agree that knowledge is important, but are easily convinced by unfocused polemics. To me it feels like a desert full of mirages. I can tell that there is something interesting going on over the horizon, but I have a growing suspicion that this book will never take me there.

Julie Flin & Alex de Waal – Darfur, A new history of a long war (2009)

When the decades-old ethnic conflicts in Darfur, in western Sudan, escalated in the early 00s, ethnically African groups formed two rebel movements, the SLA and the JEM. The government in Khartoum decided to use local Arab supremacist militias, known as Janjaweed, to suppress them. This casued a borderline-genocidal conflict in 2003 to 2004, which had morphed into a more traditional civil war by the time the West started to warn of a Darfur genocide. The authors argue that for the years that followed, the “save Darfur” media story had little to do with reality.

Recommended: Yes.

Michel Houellebecq – The Elementary Particles (1998)

Absolutely Fabulous with angst instead of jokes.

Recommended: No. It’s a powerful statement of disgust, but didactic The Way We Live Now novels don’t age well. Houellebecq can see nothing but his own generation’s sufferings, and I’m not impressed by the philosophy or the attempt at an SF ending.

Nir Rosen – Aftermath (2010)

Rosen argues that the sectarian civil war in Iraq was not inevitable, but a result of the mistakes of the American occupation force, which created a level of Sunni-Shiite rivalry that had not really been an issue before. The counterinsurgency tactics they adopted later may or may not have helped to end the civil war, depending on who you ask. What is certain is that lots of people died and got scattered across neighbouring countries. Mission failed.

Recommended: Yes, although the book reads like a draft, long and unfocused.

William J. Knaus – The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety (2008)

I’m not an anxious person, with a few exceptions, but I used to be. I bugfixed myself by accidentally combining a set of techniques – self-awareness, changing how I thought, meditation, and gradual exposure to the things I feared – that I later learned are similar to cognitive behavioral therapy, and also, on a different level, to Stoicism. If I am sometimes impatient with people who complain that they’re helpless, it’s because I once walked out of my own personal mud-hole one step at a time. Paradoxically, it’s because I know it’s hard that I look down on you for saying it’s impossible.

Recommended: Yes. If I had had a book like this at the time, I could have gone about it in a more focused way.

Owen Jones – Chavs, The demonization of the working class (2011)

I’m confused by how British television portrays poor people. Which are insightful caricatures, and which mean-spirited? Living in a classless society, I can’t read the markers. Jones argues that it’s all mean-spirited. Unfortunately, this is one of those books that makes its point by quoting stupid pundits saying stupid things, then ties it all together with the author’s ideology, (ie. the Tories hate poor people). But it does have funny moments, such as when Jones writes that his real complaint against the comedy-drama Shameless isn’t the characters, but that it doesn’t Portray Poverty In Its Proper Political Context (ie. the Tories hate poor people).

Read: 23 pages, then skimmed the rest.

Recommended: No.

Tim Clissold – Mr China (2004)

Clissold arrives in China at the time of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour with one simple goal: To invest hundreds of millions of dollars in China’s least-broken businesses, so that everyone  can make lots of money and be happy. All that stands in his way is the small matter of reinventing capitalism in a country where managers don’t care about profits, power flows in unexpected patterns, and rule of law is an optional accessory.

Recommended: Yes. It’s hilarious, and the chaotic picture it paints is oddly beautiful. It’s like one of those Terry Pratchett novels where they invent the police force, or postage stamps.

Pascal Bruckner – The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010)

Is there anything more boring than a French polemicist, even one you’re inclined to agree with?

Recommended: No. It doesn’t help that the translation is bad too.

Lilia Shevtsova – Yeltsin’s Russia (1999)

After the fall of Communism, Russia  introduced democratic institutions, but the opportunity to build an actual democratic culture was wasted by the democrats themselves, whose poorly thought out reforms succeeded only in discreding their ideals for the (so far) following two decades.

Recommended: Yes, although it loses focus, as all histories do, as it approaches the present time (1999).  Interestingly, there is not a single word about Vladimir Putin.

Christopher Benfey – The Great Wave (2003)

Stories about the first generations of westerners who fell in love with Japan, in the second half of the 19th century. Well told, but Benfey doesn’t answer the more interesting question: To what extent did these “Gilded Age misfits” see the real Japan, and to what extent did they see an exotic caricature?

Recommended: Yes.

Sigurd Skirbekk - Nasjonalstaten, velferdsstatens grunnlag (2008)

Yes I do want to read a book that uses historical, sociological and ideological approaches to argue how the welfare state grew out of and depends on the nation state, but this isn’t it. This is rather what happens when you set out to write an opinion piece, get distracted, and, by the time you’ve finished, find that you might as well publish it all as a book.

Read: 53 pages.

Recommended: No.

Robert Silverberg – Those Who Watch (1967)

Then the stranger spoke and he said do not fear / I come from a planet a long way from here / And I bring a message for mankind to hear / and suddenly the sweetest music filled the air.

+ I don’t know what she’s doing to me / Is it a kiss? Is it supposed to be? / I wasn’t programmed for this, you see / I only know it in theory.

Recommended: Weakly. This UFO tale is a bit on the nice side, but also a bit on the short side, so it all evens out. It’s actually been sitting unread in my bookshelves for 15 years (!), and I only now got around to reading it.

Cas Mudde – Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (2007)

I’m not convinced by Mudde’s classification system. He identifies radical right parties partly by features, such as populism, that may actually be consequences of the political landscape. (Ie. an army that finds itself in a good defensive position, is likely to defend, but this reflects the landscape, more than the army. Same with populism: It reflects a relative position as an outsider.) And some features he identifies with the “radical right” exist in parties of all types, such as their typology of enemies. The radical right itself, for instance, is the “within the state, within the nation” enemy of the mainstream parties, in the same way that the political elite is to the radical right.

Recommended: Strongly. Partly for what it reveals about the difficulty of classifying political parties from different countries, and partly for the specifics about these parties, which provide what is usually missing in discussions of the radical right: Perspective. (Amusingly, Norway’s supposedly radical right Progress Party is excluded for being too moderate.)

Alfred Bester – Who He? (1953)

Bester wrote two of the greatest SF novels of all time, but this isn’t one of them. It’s a mainstream novel, and, although less interesting, in its best sections it gives you the same feeling of sitting in the backseat of a manic driver’s car.

Read: 165 pages.

Recommended: No. It starts electric, like a non-absurd Steve Aylett novel, but goes flat, aiming towards an obvious multiple personalities gimmick.

I september 2003 ble det sprengt en bombe utenfor lokalene til menigheten Sannhetens Ord i Slemmestad. Vinduer 100 meter unna ble blåst ut, og bare tilfeldigheter gjorde at ingen kom til skade. Bak angrepet stod et søskenpar med nære forbindelser til menigheten. De anklaget Sannhetens Ord for å være en sekt, som drev med hjernevask og streng kontroll av livet til medlemmene.

Mediedekningen etter angrepet var sympatisk for søskenparet, og fokuserte på sektbeskyldningene mot Sannhetens Ord. Eksmedlemmer ble sitert på at de hadde full forståelse for angrepet, og sekteksperter brukte anledningen til å advare mot det omfattende sektproblemet i Norge. Angrepet ble ikke vinklet som et terrorangrep på uskyldige, men som et tragisk resultat av en fanatisk sekts overgrep mot egne medlemmer.

Men var angrepet egentlig så forskjellig fra det å kaste en bombe mot en synagoge? Det er et av spørsmålene Audhild Skoglund stiller i boken Sekter.

Les resten av anmeldelsen her.