Rieff, de Waal, Cambridge History of Latin America

I've read volumes 3 and 4 of the Cambridge History of Latin America. I am finding the answers to the questions I had, about why the countries had failed to develop their economies and political systems. There are a number of reasons, but two are the fact that the Spanish/Portuguese metropolis never developed passed a feudal political or economic system, so that at independence the many Latin American countries could hardly have moved beyond that point. Second, the Spanish and Portuguese states had no legitimate governments when independence was achieved by the colonies, so that it was the equivalent of the Belgians abandoning the Congo all of a sudden, leaving them with state apparatus that was completely inadequate to the tasks.

I also read David Rieff's cri du coeur, A Bed for the Night. This, and Alex De Waal's Famine Crimes, round out a half dozen books I've read about international aid. I have to say that these recent spate of books about international aid don't hold a candle to Waal's prescient, excellent, illuminating work. I have concluded that as international aid got to be Big Business, so to speak, a way of life, it became what the welfare state actually is in Canada -- a machine that benefits those that are employed by it, rather than the people intended to be helped. And so international aid organizations fall prey to politics, and claim more than they accomplish, and cater to the media, and make only the most marginal of differences. I believe all of it, I find it follows the pattern of most organizations originally created to help.

Terry, Dikotter, Cambridge History of Latin America

Since my last post, I've read an issue of Hello Canada, the Globe, Vanity Fair, GQ Style Guide, Urban Farmer, Utne Reader, and two issues each of the New Scientist, Eclectic Reading, and The Economist. I've read Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine, about the China famine, and Terry's Condemned to Repeat, about the problems in international aid. I have also read the first volume of the Cambridge History of Latin America, all 800 pages of it! Took a long time.

Garner, Carlyle, McFarquhar

Since my last post I've read one issue of The New Yorker, one issue of The Globe, one issue of Hello Canada, one issue of The Economist, two issues of Eclectic Reading, and two issues of The New Scientist.

I also read the two latter volumes of McFarqhuar's Origins of the Cultural Revolution, in which I discovered not just the terrible, sad, wrong-headed decisions of the Communist leadership leading to the terrible famine death toll in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I also read a biography of Hugh Garner, another alcoholic writer, and a biography of Carlyle. I also finished Trevor Roper's Last Days of Hitler. The moment I found the most memorable in that book, apart from upper-class condemnation of Hitler's bourgeois habits -- a strange accusation given everything else there is to criticize about him -- was the fact that after Hitler's body was removed from the bunker, everyone immediately lit up. The smoking ban enforced in his lifetime was now, at last, at an end. Extraordinary picture it dredges up.