Updates from March, 2011

• These Borrowed Words

  Jocelyn Ling 2:14 pm on March 27, 2011 | 2 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: books, education (7), journalism (5), personal (10)

  There is one ele­ment that has always been a con­sis­tent theme in my life, wher­ever, when­ever: and that is books. I’ve had a read­ing obses­sion ever since the age of seven, which till to this day, I remem­ber the book that started it all — The Magic Paint­brush. I remem­ber hid­ing books in the drawer of my school desk back in Malaysia, and when­ever I thought the teacher was look­ing the other way, I would pull the book out and sneak a cou­ple pages of read­ing. It was easy, see, with 50 other kids packed in a class, elbow to elbow, to get away with it. I believe(d) that books would teach me things about life that a class­room never could. One that I still main­tain to this day. I devoured books from Enid Blyton’s entire col­lec­tion to the rem­i­nis­cent Sweet Val­ley days of teenage-hood. And then, my world of books changed when I dis­cov­ered the world of lit­er­a­ture and non-fiction. I’ve never looked back since.

  I recently stum­bled across this incred­i­ble list of books, that I am now deter­mined to get through in a year (I’ll let you know how it goes!). It’s a list by one of my fav orga­ni­za­tions: Acu­men Fund and it’s actu­ally the rec­om­mended read­ing list for their Fel­lows. I’ll try to share my thoughts on each book as I move through the list. But mean­while, here it is, below:

  *I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.. it’s a start!

  

  GOOD SOCIETY READINGS
  Rights and Responsibilities

  “Cul­ture Is Des­tiny: A Con­ver­sa­tion with Lee Kuan Yew” by Fareed Zakaria (For­eign Affairs, March/April 1994)
  “Empow­er­ment for a Cul­ture of Peace and Devel­op­ment” by Aung San Suu Kyi (address to World Com­mis­sion on Cul­ture and Devel­op­ment, Novem­ber 21, 1994)
  “Let­ter from Birm­ing­ham Jail” by Mar­tin Luther King Jr. (April 16, 1963)
  The Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights (Gen­eral Assem­bly of the United Nations, Decem­ber 10, 1948)

  Lib­erty and Social Order
  “The Con­trari­ness of the Mad Farmer” by Wen­dell Berry in Farm­ing: A Hand Book (Har­court, Brace, Jovanovich)
  “Democ­racy” by Langston Hughes
  Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
  “Mes­sage to the Con­gress of Angos­tura, 1819” by Simón Bolí­var
  The Prince by Nic­colò Machi­avelli
  “Two Con­cepts of Lib­erty” by Isa­iah Berlin (address before Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, Octo­ber 31, 1958)
  Equal­ity and the Quest for Social Jus­tice
  The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  Democ­racy in Amer­ica by Alexis de Toc­queville
  Long Walk to Free­dom: The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Nel­son Man­dela by Nel­son Man­dela (Lit­tle, Brown and Com­pany)
  “O Yes” by Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Rid­dle (Ran­dom House)
  The Social Con­tract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Com­mu­nity and the Search for Human­ity
  The Book of Gen­e­sis
  The Four Noble Truths of Bud­dhism
  “How to Write about Africa” by Binya­vanga Wainaina (Granta 92, Win­ter 2005)
  On Iden­tity by Amin Maalouf (Harvill Pan­ther)
  Silent Spring by Rachel Car­son (Houghton Mif­flin)
  “Speech upon Receiv­ing the Philadel­phia Lib­erty Medal” by Václav Havel (July 4, 1994)
  Prop­erty and Pro­duc­tiv­ity
  Devel­op­ment as Free­dom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
  Equal­ity and Effi­ciency: The Big Trade­off by Arthur M. Okun (The Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion)
  The Muqad­dimah by Ibn Khaldūn (Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press)
  The Repub­lic by Plato

  LEADERSHIP READINGS
  “Because We Can, We Must” by Bono (com­mence­ment address at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, May 17, 2004)
  A Con­fes­sion by Leo Tol­stoy
  Death and the King’s Horse­man by Wole Soyinka (W.W. Nor­ton)
  “A Far Cry from Africa” by Derek Wal­cott in The Nor­ton Anthol­ogy of Poetry (W.W. Nor­ton)
  Good to Great: Why Some Com­pa­nies Make the Leap…and Oth­ers Don’t by Jim Collins (Harper­Collins)
  “Great Expec­ta­tions” by Bill Gates (com­mence­ment address at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, June 7, 2007)
  Lead­er­ship on the Line: Stay­ing Alive Through the Dan­gers of Lead­ing by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Lin­sky (Har­vard Busi­ness School Press)
  Lead­ing from Within: Poetry that Sus­tains the Courage to Lead by Sam M. Intra­tor and Megan Scrib­ner (Jossey-Bass)
  Let­ter to Daniel: Dis­patches from the Heart by Fer­gal Keane (Pen­guin Books)
  The Oppos­able Mind: How Suc­cess­ful Lead­ers Win Through Inte­gra­tive Think­ing by Roger L. Mar­tin (Har­vard Busi­ness School Press)
  “Rebel­lion” by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky in The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov
  Self-Renewal: The Indi­vid­ual and the Inno­v­a­tive Soci­ety by John W. Gard­ner (Harper­Collins)
  Ser­vant Lead­er­ship: A Jour­ney into the Nature of Legit­i­mate Power and Great­ness by Robert K. Green­leaf (Paulist Press)

  FICTION
  Black Boy by Richard Wright (Harper­Peren­nial)
  A Fine Bal­ance by Rohin­ton Mis­try (Vin­tage Inter­na­tional)
  A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Heine­mann)
  Inde­pen­dent Peo­ple by Halldór Lax­ness (Vin­tage Inter­na­tional)
  Midnight’s Chil­dren by Salman Rushdie (Pen­guin Books)
  The Ones Who Walk Away From Ome­las by Ursula K. Le Guin (Cre­ative Edu­ca­tion)
  Pur­ple Hibis­cus by Chi­ma­manda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor)
  Sea­son of Migra­tion to the North by Tayeb Salih (NYRB Clas­sics)
  Shadow Lines by Ami­tav Ghosh (Mariner Books)
  Shoot­ing an Ele­phant by George Orwell (Pen­guin Books)
  The Tem­pest by William Shake­speare
  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Heine­mann)
  Train to Pak­istan by Khush­want Singh (Grove Press)

  BOOKS ON INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR POVERTY ALLEVIATION
  “A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty” by Mar­i­anne Bertrand, Send­hil Mul­lainathan, and Eldar Shafir (Amer­i­can Eco­nomic Review 94, no. 2)
  The Bot­tom Bil­lion: Why the Poor­est Coun­tries are Fail­ing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Col­lier (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press)
  Cap­i­tal­ism as if the World Mat­ters by Jonathon Por­ritt and Amory B. Lovins (Earth­scan Pub­li­ca­tions)
  Devel­op­ment as Free­dom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
  The End of Poverty: Eco­nomic Pos­si­bil­i­ties for Our Time by Jef­frey D. Sachs (Pen­guin Press)
  The For­tune at the Bot­tom of the Pyra­mid: Erad­i­cat­ing Poverty Through Prof­its by C.K. Pra­ha­lad (Whar­ton School Pub­lish­ing)
  Mak­ing Glob­al­iza­tion Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Nor­ton)
  Max­i­mum City: Bom­bay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Knopf)
  The Mys­tery of Cap­i­tal: Why Cap­i­tal­ism Tri­umphs in the West and Fails Every­where Else by Her­nando de Soto (Basic Books)
  Patholo­gies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer (Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Press)
  Phil­an­thro­cap­i­tal­ism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Blooms­bury Press)
  Plan B 2.0: Res­cu­ing a Planet Under Stress and a Civ­i­liza­tion in Trou­ble by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Nor­ton)
  Port­fo­lios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Mor­duch, Stu­art Ruther­ford, and Orlanda Ruthven (Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press)
  The White Man’s Bur­den: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Lit­tle Good by Williams Rus­sell East­erly (Pen­guin Books)
  Wiki­nomics: How Mass Col­lab­o­ra­tion Changes Every­thing by Don Tap­scott and Anthony D. Williams (Port­fo­lio Hard­cover)
  The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Finan­cial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebas­t­ian Mal­laby (Pen­guin Press)

   

• Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

  Jocelyn Ling 8:44 pm on October 11, 2010 | 2 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Africa (5), change (18), education (7), empowerment (8), inspiration (12), peace (4), women (5), world (13)

  Women hold up half the sky — Chi­nese Proverb

  Real­ity is hard. It is a star­tling rev­e­la­tion at times often because we choose to sur­round our­selves with our view and expe­ri­ence of the world. This Thanks­giv­ing, I am reminded of real­ity when I sat down to read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn throw an inter­est­ing twist into the con­ven­tional view of plights of women around the world: by telling their sto­ries. From Cam­bo­dia to South Africa. From sex slaves to mater­nal health. By putting a name, emo­tion and pas­sion into the sto­ries. This ten­ta­tive foray into the realm of story-telling melds sur­pris­ing well with what is, essen­tially, a pas­sion­ate call to action against our generation’s most per­va­sive human rights vio­la­tion: the oppres­sion of women and girls worldwide.

  The open­ing of the book fol­lows the story of Srey Rath, a young Cam­bo­dian teenager, who was sold as a sex salve across the bor­ders, end­ing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where she endured rou­tine bru­tal­ity and con­stant humil­i­a­tion. It was a huge shock to my sys­tem, as Malaysia is some­place I call my home town…  to read in such vivid detail the human rights vio­la­tion done to Srey Rath was stun­ning in every sense.

  These sto­ries of human per­se­ver­ance, injus­tice and ulti­mately hope, just like Srey Rath, are woven into three main issues: sex traf­fick­ing and forced pros­ti­tu­tion; gender-based vio­lence e.g. honor killings and mass rape and mater­nal mor­tail­ity. Sub issues include edu­ca­tion, micro­cre­dit and reli­gion. The sto­ries in the book are shock­ing, but ulti­mately this is the cen­tral truth of the book: Women aren’t the prob­lem but the solu­tion. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.

  “It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, pre­cisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all bat­tles of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. More girls are killed in this rou­tine “gen­der­cide” in any one decade than peo­ple were slaugh­tered in all the geno­cides of the twen­ti­eth century.

  In the nine­teenth cen­tury, the cen­tral moral chal­lenge was slav­ery. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, it was the bat­tle against total­i­tar­i­an­ism. We believe that in this cen­tury, the para­mount moral chal­lenge will be the strug­gle for gen­der equal­ity around the world. ”

  Through sto­ries, Kristof and WuDunn demon­strate how the key to eco­nomic progress lies in the fact that as a soci­ety, we need to stop ignor­ing women who hold up half the sky. Unleash­ing this incred­i­ble human poten­tial is not only the right thing to do in terms of our own shared human­ity, but also the best way to tackle poverty. They show how in vastly dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, the endurance of the human spirit and how a lit­tle help can go a long way e.g. the sim­ple act of iodiz­ing salt to improve a baby’s IQ.

  I won’t go into the details of the book because my sum­mary will not do these incred­i­ble sto­ries jus­tice. How­ever, on a per­sonal level, this book’s mes­sage has imprinted itself deeply within my beliefs in inter­na­tional devel­op­ment. After all, how many books make such a  state­ment about a mat­ter than con­cerns every­one because of our shared human­ity? The sto­ries of these women show me the resilience and amount of hope they have within them­selves who have every rea­son to give up but con­tinue on. It’s so mov­ing and inspi­ra­tional that I just want to shout it out loud and tell every­one about the issues Kristof and WuDunn have writ­ten about. If there is one thing that this book is about, it is the story of transformation.

  Rat­ing: 10/10

  “If you think edu­ca­tion is expen­sive, try igno­rance.” — Derek Bok