Suzanne Gordon, coauthor of Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care, spoke at the Miami Dade College Medical Center Campus this week and the Miami Herald has some good coverage:
The United States finds itself once again exceedingly unpopular on the Japanese island of Okinawa; an American marine has been accused of raping a 14-year-old girl—see “Rice Offers Regret After Marine Is Accused of Rape on Okinawa” in the New York Times. Cornell University Press has two books that might be helpful in understanding this story from two different angles:
Women of Okinawa: Nine Voices from a Garrison Island by Ruth Ann Keyso
Base Politics: Democratic Change and the U.S. Military Overseas by Alexander Cooley (forthcoming)
International recognition of the independent nation of Kosovo continues apace. For background on Kosovo’s slow journey to independence, see Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo by Iain King and Whit Mason.
CNN reports that East Timor has declared a state of emergency (2/12/0 
after a new wave of violence, including a brace of assassination attempts on President Jose Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao; Australia is sending security forces to the country. A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor by Joseph Nevins is a definitive and chilling account of East Timor’s terrible struggles for independence from Indonesia. In the Japan Times, Jeff Kingston wrote of this book:
“This is a gripping and powerful saga rooted in the horrible atrocities and deprivation endured by the East Timorese following Indonesia’s invasion in 1975. Indonesian security forces ruled ruthlessly until 1999, causing nearly 200,000 conflict-related deaths, imprisoning and torturing thousands more, while raping and plundering with abandon. A generation of East Timorese grew up where the rule of law was a distant rumor and human rights were routinely violated. Joseph Nevins briefly recapitulates this history, focusing on international complicity in these crimes against humanity, but mostly dwells on the troubling failure to secure justice.”
Another Cornell University Press title that puts this conflict into context is In the Shadow of “Just Wars”: Violence, Politics, and Humanitarian Action, by Médecins sans Frontières (edited by Fabrice Weissman). In the Virginia Quarterly Review, Patrick LaRochelle wrote:
“With insightful case studies of conflicts ranging from East Timor and Afghanistan to Sudan and Colombia, and thoughtful considerations of issues such as the responsibility of humanitarian aid workers in war crimes trials and the growing tension between Islamic, Christian and secular humanitarian NGO’s, In the Shadow of ‘Just Wars’ is a significant and sobering work that should be engaged by humanitarians, politicians, and responsible global citizens alike.”
Nicolas Véron, author of Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, and Thomas Philippon have an editorial in the February 12, 2008 edition of the Financial Times: Europe’s Saplings Need Financial Fertiliser.
The newly appointed U.N. Peace Messenger, George Clooney, gave a press conference on January 31 in which he discussed the seemingly intractable situation in Darfur: Clooney Aims to Shine Celebrity Light on U.N. (via the New York Times) Cornell University Press has published one of the premier books on the conflict in Darfur, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Revised and Updated Edition) by Gérard Prunier, and there are other books on our list that may also be of interest in this connection: Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite by Carne Ross and The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda by Scott Straus. Straus’s book, which won the Award for Excellence in Government and Political Science given by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, addresses the issue of how the motivations of aggressors in ethnic conflict may be quite different than they are imagined from a distance. Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo by Iain King and Whit Mason is an analysis of UN intervention in a very different conflict that may also provide lessons for the future.
The death of Suharto has brought renewed attention to the political landscape of Indonesia, past and present. John T. Sidel’s Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia provides insights into the political climate that saw the end of Suharto’s 32-year rule.
For the past week or so, the litblogs have been abuzz with discussion about the final disposition of Vladimir Nabokov’s manuscript The Original of Laura—will VN’s son Dimitri publish or destroy this work, written on fifty notecards? Ron Rosenbaum’s essay Dimitri’s Choice at Slate is the focal point of this discussion, but Rosenbaum has been on the case for a few years now—see his New York Observer article Dear Dmitri Nabokov: Don’t Burn Laura! Let Draft Gather Dust, from November 2005. And, wouldn’t you know it, a Cornell author started all the fuss. In 2005, Rosenbaum wrote,
“I came across an essay by Harvard professor Leland de la Durantaye [author of Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov] on Lolita in The Village Voice, in which he mentions the existence of The Original of Laura:
‘When Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Original of Laura. His express wish was that it be destroyed upon his death. Before him, Virgil and Kafka had left similar instructions [to destroy their work]; neither was obeyed. Nor was Nabokov. His wife, Véra, found herself unable to carry out her late husband’s wishes, and when she passed away in 1991 she bequeathed the decision to their son. The manuscript’s location is kept secret.’”
Here is de la Durantaye’s Village Voice piece: The Original of Lolita
The New York Times reports today on a trader at the French bank Société Générale who defrauded his employer to the tune of $7.1 billion. Described by the bank’s chairman as “an imprudent employee in the corporate and investment banking division,” the trader’s “whereabouts are unknown.” By comparison, the infamous Nick Leeson case involved a loss of *only* $1.8 billion (but those were 1995 dollars). How can a fraud of this magnitude be perpetrated? What measures do financial institutions take to try to prevent such offenses? Some answers may be found in Cornell’s Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, by Nicolas Véron. Raghuram Rajan, Economic Counselor and Director of Research, International Monetary Fund, said of this book: “ Smoke & Mirrors, Inc., is an intriguing introduction to the use and abuse of accounting in the modern capitalist enterprise. It is a must-read for students, investors, regulators, and anyone interested in understanding the shenanigans behind recent corporate scandals.”
An Agence France-Presse story gives a brief summary of a new Commonwealth Fund study showing that the French success (and U.S. failure) in providing health care described by Paul Dutton in Differential Diagnoses remains profound: “France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries.”
France is healthcare leader, US comes dead last: study (AFP)
The full article describing the study’s results is here:
Measuring the Health of Nations (Health Affairs)
