1. Lynn Freed, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home – Her message is that to be a great writer you must be brutal in exposing the truth and somewhat brutal period; a short memoir of female South African ambition, recommended.
2. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents – Western study of Orientalism was not always racist or biased, a useful corrective to Edward Said.
3. Roy Richard Grinker, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism – One of the better books on the topic, by an anthropologist with an autistic daughter, most interesting for its cross-cultural perspectives.
4. Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat. Yes the topic is "overfished," but this book stands above the others. Among other virtues, it has a good treatment of which regulations and property rights management systems are actually working.
5. ESPN-NBA; there is more logic on this site than almost any blog, worth the price.
1. For a proper evisceration of Edward Said, see Bernard Lewis,
‘The Question of Orientalism’, ch. 6 in his Islam and the West,
OUP 1993.
2. I thought that Robt Irwin showed that Western studies of the
Middle East & Asia were proper disciplines, with all the
academic/professional standards of any other discipline??
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