Posts filed under ‘Books to Read’
Book Review
Book: ‘Contending Nationalisms of Oromia and Ethiopia: Struggling for Statehood, Sovereignty, and Multinational Democracy’ by Asafa Jalata
(Global Academic Publishing, Binghamton University, $34.95)
229 pages
If you are interested in issues of self-determination and multinational democracy, security, and development in the Eastern Africa, and have been puzzled by why decades of experimentation and foreign aid poured into the region yielded anything but desired outcomes, a new academic book by one of the foremost authorities in the region can help you understand the underlying causes.
If you are also more specifically interested in Oromo and Ethiopian studies, Eastern African and African studies, and studies of nationalisms and racism, this book has answers for you as to why democracy, self-determination, stability, development and peace have not been achieved in Eastern Africa.
Or if you have been reading books on Oromia, Ethiopia, and Eastern Africa that address the symptoms, but not the causes of the socio-economic problems in the region, this book will change the way you have so far perceived the region, the major issues, and players. Read more http://gadaa.com/oduu/?p=3985
Precious Ethiopian psalter will take its rightful place
By Nancy Haught
Benjamin Brink/The OregonianSteve Delamarter sits with the royal Psalter made for Emperor Menilek II.Before he opened it, Steve Delamarter knew the book before him would be extraordinary. The smooth sienna leather was worn in a few places but hand-tooled and carefully fitted together inside the cover. The rough edges of its yellow parchment pages didn’t look hand-cut. Then he recognized the intricate section headers, entwined lines of red, green and yellow ink, as the work of a government scriptorium.
Delamarter, an Old Testament professor at George Fox Evangelical Seminary, is founder and director of the Ethiopian Manuscript Imaging Project. In the past five years he’s tracked down 900 rare books owned by dealers and collectors outside the African country. He and his team digitize the contents, creating copies for Ethiopian libraries. It’s an attempt to preserve some of the cultural heritage that’s been lost in the turmoil of Ethiopia’s history.
So Delamarter is used to handling rare manuscripts. Those he works with are often well-worn religious volumes, handwritten in Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He’s examined many Psalters, books of Psalms and other texts used for prayer.
But this one was different.
Buried inside was a rare marker that Delamarter had seen only once before. In a kind of handmade reverse, a line of white letters stood out against a line of red ink. He ran his index finger under the words as he translated aloud: “This book belongs to the king of kings, Menilek.”
Delamarter took the book to Saint John’s University in Minnesota, where he showed it to his mentor and colleague, Getatchew Haile, an Ethiopian expatriate and expert on Ethiopian manuscripts. “This,” Haile told Delamarter, “is a national treasure.”
Emperor Menilek II (1844-1913) united the separate kingdoms of modern Ethiopia in 1889 and thwarted an Italian invasion in 1896. He modernized his country by introducing banking, a postal system, railway, electricity, telephones, telegraphs and automobiles. But he’s also remembered in Africa and parts of Asia for resisting imperialism.
“This was his personal Psalter, with which he’d pray every morning,” Haile says in a telephone interview. “It was one of the items that he touched. This is important museum material.”
Except that it belongs to someone else.
Ethiopia has struggled — and still does — with its own diversity and violence from inside and out. Political unrest has forced thousands to flee. Some have taken manuscripts and other cultural treasures with them, Haile says. His own story attests to the violence that has plagued Ethiopia. A coup deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Haile, a Ge’ez scholar at what is now Addis Ababa University, was shot as he resisted arrest. Haile was allowed to leave Ethiopia to receive medical care — he is a paraplegic — and came to the United States in 1976. A MacArthur Fellow, he is curator of the Ethiopian Study Center at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in Minnesota.
Delamarter, interested in scribal communities who still transcribe religious texts by hand, first visited Ethiopia in 2004. He saw widespread poverty tempting Ethiopians to sell religious manuscripts to tourists or book dealers. A personal prayer book, worth the equivalent of $100 to another Ethiopian, may be sold to a tourist or book dealer for $300 or $400, Delamarter says. Collectors will pay $1,200 for the same volume, $2,000 if it’s illustrated. And some take manuscripts apart and sell the pages separately.
Menilek’s Psalter, which Delamarter dates from the late 19th or early 20th century, is owned by Gerald Weiner, a manuscript collector who is also a senior vice president of Morgan Stanley in Chicago. The Psalter was in a batch of books Weiner bought from a dealer. Neither was aware of the book’s value until Weiner entrusted it to Delamarter for digitalization.
It was Haile’s idea that Delamarter ask Weiner to give the book to a new museum planned in Ankober, Ethiopia, to be dedicated to Menilek. Delamarter had never made such a request of a book owner, he says. He’d been content to create digital copies and preserve the contents for the use of students and scholars.
“The more I tell collectors how valuable a book is, the more they want to hold on to it — or sell it,” Delamarter says. He estimated that Menilek’s Psalter was worth about $18,000, but he prepared “a 19-minute presentation” for Weiner and made the call.
A manuscript collector for about eight years, Weiner specializes in Ethiopian Jewish texts and plans to donate his collection to the University of California at Los Angeles, which is home to many Ethiopian refugees. Delamarter says Weiner listened to the opening of that 19-minute pitch.
“As soon as he told me how important this work was, its importance to the Ethiopian people, I wanted to do the right thing,” Weiner says. “I wanted the book to be back where it belonged, honoring the man who owned it.”
Delamarter leaves Monday to return the book to Ethiopia, where eventually it will be displayed in the Ankober Municipal Museum. Much as he’d like to, Haile can’t go with him.
“I never thought the owner would just give it back,” Haile marvels, “so precious a book that is his own property. That was my first thought, but some people have a good heart.”
Nancy Haught: 503-294-7625; nancyhaught@news.oregonian.com
Books to read: 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (Hardcover)
13 Bankers
| By | C. E. Selby |
I grew up in the home of a banker. But Dad was a small-town bank president in what we call “community banks.” And the bank still exists and is doing well in Vermont. But my dad, when he retired in the early 70s, said, “Banking isn’t banking any more.” I had no idea what he was talking about, mainly because I was never much interested in banking. But I have become quite interested in it now that this country has become economically handcuffed by these so-called bankers.
This is a very well written book with a very comprehensive set of notes (footnotes) at the end. In other words, anyone writing comments about these authors being conspiracy theorists is simply ignoring the content of the book. Having said this, however, I want to acknowledge that the book isn’t written for people who don’t have at least a little knowledge about how the world of finance works. In other words, I found myself lost in many places. But I cannot fault the writers or the writing. I simply don’t have what we English teachers would call “prior knowledge,” the essential tool to reading.
The authors are not bashing anyone. The book is structured so the reader is provided with some history (and it is sourced history) before being presented with what happened and how it happened. I like how objective Johnson and Kvak are. To use a phrase that I captured from a cable channel I would never watch, this is “fair and balanced.”
What most interested this reader is the case the writers make for “The American Oligarchy.” Indeed that is what we have with these “financial elites” that run Wall Street. They are so tightly tied into our non-functioning Congress (and to some degree a too-tied-to-Wall-Street White House and to five very-tied-to-Wall-Street on the Supreme Court).
I intend to give this book as a gift to a few people I know who really need accurate information. But do “tea baggers” read I wonder.
Books to read-Once upon a life: Abraham Verghese
Books To Read
He was a young medical student in Ethiopia when Haile Selassie was toppled, in a coup that plunged the country into two decades of bloodshed. Here, Abraham Verghese describes the lead-up to the day in 1973 when his world turned upside-down.
Whenever I hear the phrase “geography is destiny” I think of my parents, George and Mariam, schoolteachers from India, arriving in the misty mountain empire of Ethiopia in 1951 within two weeks of each other and not knowing a soul. They were there because another traveller, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, happened to be on a state visit to India shortly after his country was freed from Mussolini’s occupation. Haile Selassie, head of an ancient Christian nation surrounded on all sides by Muslim nations, knew of the legend of Saint Thomas’s arrival in south India, on Kerala’s shores (which took place 1,600 years before the Portuguese brought Catholicism to Goa). Saint Thomas made converts of the Brahmins he encountered. Their descendants, the Syrian Christians (so called because they owed their allegiance to the Church in Antioch) are the community to which my parents belong. The Emperor wanted to see those first churches, and his motorcade happened to drive through Kerala at the hour when the roads were thronged with legions of schoolkids in uniform.
It was that sight, so my parents say, that so impressed Haile Selassie that he hired all 400 of his first batch of teachers for the new schools he was building across the empire from this one state in India. To this day, almost every Ethiopian you meet abroad who is over 40 years of age will tell you that they had an Indian teacher in their school, someone with an Old Testament name such as Thomas, or Jacob, or Zachariah, or Verghese (the latter derived from Giorgis, or George). A change in their geography allowed Mariam Abraham and George Verghese to meet a few weeks after they arrived in Ethiopia and they eventually married. But it all began with what the emperor saw on a morning drive. The world turns on the smallest of things.
Unlike my parents, I was born and raised in Addis Ababa. I was accepted into the medical school at what was then called Haile Selassie the First University. Our professors were Ethiopians who had trained in Beirut and British physicians who served in Ethiopia courtesy of the British Council. It was a wonderful education and I considered myself very fortunate.
In 1973, which was my third year of medical school, an ITV documentary revealed to the world a massive famine devastating the Wollo region of Ethiopia. The world knew, but we in the capital city did not. When word finally filtered back, and later when we got to secretly see the documentary (now crudely doctored so that scenes of the lavish state dinners the emperor hosted were spliced in with scenes of the famine), it spelt the end for life as we knew it.
I’d grown up with Emperor Haile Selassie’s face staring down at me from portraits in shops and houses: the famous hook nose over set and narrow lips, the regal brow and the penetrating gaze were burned into our subconscious. The Lion of Judah, the benevolent, dignified, firm, scheming monarch whose lineage could be traced back to the Queen of Sheba, seemed immortal. He had singlehandedly brought his country into the modern era. Just before the Second World War, in Haile Selassie’s speech to the League of Nations protesting about Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, he had warned the world about what was coming: if you let Italy do this, then you give Hitler permission to do the same. “God and history will remember your judgment.” It made him the darling of the free world; he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1936. As a ruler he was a world apart from the crude, buffoonish and cartoonish African leaders who later made headlines – the likes of Idi Amin, Mobutu or Gaddafi.
By 1973, at 81 years of age, Haile Selassie was slowing down. But he still micromanaged, insisted on approving all appointments and promotions, kept his ministers on edge, played them against each other. Perhaps this was why the famine blindsided him: no minister wished to admit the truth to him about crop failures and human suffering.
With that famine, Emperor Haile Selassie’s aura vanished. On the radio he sounded weak and ineffectual, and on TV what had previously passed for stateliness now looked like senility. He shuffled the cabinet around but it didn’t stop the students, teachers, labour unions and armed forces from agitating, demanding concessions. It was as if they were all waking from a long sleep. When the emperor raised military pay for junior officers, he only emboldened them. Soon a military “committee” called the Derg effectively ruled the country, having isolated the emperor in his palace. The Derg was about 120 men strong – hardly an efficient machine when it came to governing.
We went about our studies as best we could, but it was difficult not to be distracted by the “creeping coup”.
Early one morning the Derg sent soldiers to the Jubilee Palace (a pukka copy of Buckingham Palace) and Haile Selassie was whisked away to jail in a Volkswagen Beetle. I pictured the emperor forced to climb into the back seat of a Beetle while in the palace garage sat his fleet of Rolls-Royce, Lincoln, Mercedes and Cadillac beauties, each custom-fitted for a diminutive monarch to sit high and to be seen.
So often during my childhood, and later, we’d see a police car come speeding down the road, waving traffic to one side. My father would pull the car over and we’d step out. First came the rumble of the escort motorcycles ridden by fearsome uniformed men wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses. Then, at last, pennant flying, the limousine de jour would slide into view, a vehicle so sensuous, so shiny and long that it seemed like a vision. Everyone bowed. Older pedestrians would actually kiss the ground. I bowed to the beauty of the car. I recall the time the emperor spotted my mother in her sari and brought his palms together in a Namaste, a gesture just for her. She still talks about that.
With Haile Selassie jailed, rumours swirled and with each day the Derg issued new proclamations. The date I won’t forget is 23 November 1973. That was when the Derg’s nominal leader, General Aman Amdom, parted ways with the group. Amdom was charismatic, Sandhurst-trained, the hero of an earlier campaign to repel a Somali invasion. At a tumultuous Derg meeting, Amdom, who was Eritrean by birth, voiced the opinion that Ethiopia should allow Eritrea to secede rather than keep fighting a costly war against a formidable guerrilla force, a war that had gone on for over two decades. He also refused to sign the order to execute various ministers and members of the royal family who had been jailed — he thought it was a terrible idea, guaranteed to distance Ethiopia from the international community. He left the meeting and barricaded himself in his house, which happened to be visible from my hospital. The Derg sent troops to arrest him and a fierce battle ensued. It ended only when a tank fired a shell into the house, killing all within. We heard all the commotion, saw the smoke. Could things get any worse, I wondered?
They could. That evening – “Bloody Saturday” as it is now called – 59 distinguished Ethiopians, members of the old guard, were taken from prison, lined up and shot. They included former prime ministers, ambassadors, generals, educators and royalty – household names, people always in the news, people my parents had known personally. My parents had left the country a year earlier, seeing the writing on the wall. At the time I’d felt resentful of their abandoning the place, but on “Bloody Saturday” I was grateful they were not around to witness the end. The barbarians had clearly taken the reins. A man named Mengistu emerged as a leader of the Derg.
Ethiopians are generous people: hospitable, formal and polite to a fault. As a schoolboy I remember sensing that these attributes were balanced by an undercurrent of violence that could be striking when it was revealed; for all I knew, this was true of all countries. It had not been that many years since the lebeshay method of divining guilt in Ethiopia was outlawed: this practice consisted of drugging a little boy and taking him to the scene of the crime, and in his hallucinatory state he was asked to point out the guilty party. Who knows how many innocents were killed by a child’s pointing finger? A previous coup attempt during my childhood had led to the hangings of the mutineers – I can recall viewing the bodies swaying from a scaffold in the centre of town.
But to me our violent bent in Ethiopia was most evident in street fights. What was peculiar was the choice of weapons – I have yet to see it anywhere else. If the opponents found themselves 20 paces away they would scramble to fling stones; bystanders beware. At fisticuffs range, the goal changed to delivering a testa – a head butt. Testa – head, in Italian – was a weapon so unique to Ethiopia that there were some who claimed it to be an ancient Ethiopian martial art. If so there were no dojos, no sensei, and no black belts, just lots of busted orbits and fractured noses.
As medical students in the casualty ward, scalp wounds were the most common injury we would see. To have the head be both the weapon of choice and the target of choice doubled the chances of a scalp wound. The wardboys in the casualty office did the stitching. The doctor’s job was to check the pupils, check the mentation and decide if further observation was needed. Bleeding from such wounds could be dramatic, startling to the novice. A professor taught us to not be so impressed with the bleeding: “Head injuries are only important because the head contains the brain,” he said, which at the time seemed both funny and self-evident. But it was profound: scalp and skull injuries, no matter how bloody, only mattered because of the possibility of brain injury.
In the aftermath of Aman Amdom’s murder and then of the Bloody Saturday massacre, it was bullet wounds one had to worry about. Since the revolution was led by junior officers, the lowliest enlisted man felt empowered. Bars were filled with military men in mufti, only their highly polished shoes giving them away. If a fight broke out, a gun or even a grenade could be pulled out.
All through this time I lived with three foreign students (from Cameroon, Kenya and Nigeria). We rented a small house on an unpaved street not far from the main road. The Derg had just closed the university for a year, and the plan was to send all students to the countryside to educate the masses. We thought it was just a ploy to get the intellectuals out of town. Expatriates like us had no choice but to leave the country. Time hung heavily on our hands as we tried to get the requisite papers. There was a curfew at eight in the evening and even in the daytime it wasn’t always safe to go out. We often heard gunshots at night. This was the period when several of my Ethiopian classmates went underground to fight for the Eritrean secessionist guerrillas or other liberation groups.
One morning as I ventured out for some groceries, I encountered a sight that changed everything: a body left on the street near the main road, a dark stain of blood on the ground from a bullet wound to the head. This sort of thing had happened before, but that day it gave me pause. There was something so dislocating about seeing a corpse outside the hospital. No one was inclined to pick up the body and no one lingered. He appeared to have been executed. His face was familiar, not an acquaintance but perhaps someone living in the neighbourhood. Or perhaps the dead all look alike.
All day that image lingered with me – not so much his face but the memory of that big blood stain on the ground, like a pillow for his head. The words kept coming to me, “Head injuries are only important because the head contains the brain.” This clearly was the important kind of head injury.
I saw much violence before that and after, but that sight, that blood stain felt like a personal message to me, an instruction that it was time to get out.
One day, at last, I had the requisite papers and permissions and I was aboard a plane bound for Rome. I wish I could say I shed tears as I sat looking out at the runway. No, I could not wait to leave. If “geography is destiny” I could not wait to change my geography.
As I looked out of the porthole, I had no way of knowing that in the ensuing years Mengistu would kill untold numbers of people in purges that made him worthy of Stalin, or that Ethiopia would adopt an Albanian-style communism, and become a vassal of the Soviet Union. I didn’t know that Mengistu would rule for nearly two decades, and that it would not be until 1991 that a liberation army led by a medical student one year my junior, Meles Zenawi, would drive Mengistu into exile (and Meles would become prime minister of Ethiopia). I had no such foresight. All I kept seeing as the plane lumbered down the runway was a lifeless body, a deep square blood stain framing the head, and how I wanted to put as much distance as I could between me and that sight.
Source: The Guardian
Discover Great new Ethiopian writers
Beneath the lion gaze
Maaza Mengiste
Maaza Mengiste
Addis Ababa, September 12, 1974: a date few Americans remember, but for Ethiopians it was the first day of a new year and the last day of Emperor Haile Selassie’s long reign. As the public discontent intensified, Selassie-blamed for decades of famine and coraption-is abandoned by his servants and cabinet members.
While the emperor quietly reflects upon his final moments in power, the struggle for new Ethiopia arrives swiftly and without mercy. Hundreds of protesters take to the streets, demanding foods and people’s government for all. Focusing on the lives of three determined members of one family, Mengiste’s gripping debut novel looks closely at the ties that bind family and country, and the sacrifices made in pursuit of justice and a life of dignity. An important work of literature, it is both timely and unforgettable. Illustrating the lengths each member is willing to go, the loyalties they must betray, and the hardships they must endure to ensure their country’s freedom from oppression, beneath the lion’s gaze is a dramatic and tragic story that is ultimately inspirational.
“An extraordinary novel that tells stories that nobody can want to hear, in such a way that we cannot stop listening.” - Bookforum
Abebe Bikila-The greatest runner of all time
buy it ibexmarket.com
Tim Judah writes an excellent biographical book about a superstar athlete, Abebe Bikila, whom has not had enough written about him given his athletic prowess. His book attempts to factually tell the story of Bikila which is something that Paul Rambali appeared to not even attempt when he wrote his book about the same runner. Judah’s book also does a superb biographical job telling about Bikila’s coach, Niskanen, whom otherwise is forgotten in history.
With so little written about this great athlete, this is a MUST READ BOOK!
Books: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Buy from www.ibexmarket.com
By Linda Kulman
“How was I supposed to live in America when I had never really left Ethiopia?” questions Sepha Stephanos, the protagonist of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. That isolation and frustation of immigrant life is thoughtfully portrayed in the award-winning fictional debut from Dinaw Mengestu.
The story of an Ethiopian immigrant who fled his country’s communist revolution, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears follows him nearly two decades later, struggling to live the American dream, with a failing convenience store in a gentrifying Washington, D.C., neighborhood.
Praised by the New York Times Book Review as a “great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel,” the book was awarded the Guardian First Book Award in 2007. The National Book Foundation included Mengestu on its list of “5 Under 35″ “as someone whose work is particularly promising and exciting.”
Mengestu, like his protagonist, was born in Ethiopia, but came to the United States in 1980 at the age of 2, a move that reunited his family after his father had been forced to flee. Mengestu was educated at Georgetown and Columbia University.
The author says the voice of the narrator “popped” into his head one night when he was walking in D.C. and “saw an Ethiopian immigrant behind the counter of a small, little grocery store.” And although the Times comments on Mengestu’s “fine ear for the way immigrants from damaged places talk in the sanctuary of their own company,” he says he “didn’t deliberately go off and research anything” to write the novel.
“Obviously, I come from a family of immigrants,” he says, “and if you pay attention to the environments around you, you get a sense of who these people are.” He adds, “The character is driven by a search for a sort of home … what I think is a pretty universal and pretty common feeling.”
This reading of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears took place in February of 2008 at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
Source NPR
This is the Book worth to read: Beneath the Lion’s gaze
by Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio
Meaza Mengiste
But the experience was so traumatic she has very clear memories of what happened.
“I remembered so vividly my life in Ethiopia, and I remember very specific moments and those stayed with me here,” she said. “And as I grew older I started wanting to put them into context, to try to find a historical and political explanation for what I remembered.”
So she wrote “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,” a critically-acclaimed novel about a family living through the Ethiopian revolution. The story also tells of the last days of Hailie Selassie before his death in prison.
Maaza Mengiste, who now lives in New York, told Euan Kerr even though many people wanted the Emperor gone, his removal was traumatic.
Broadcast Dates
