Beginning with Heidegger

Millerman draws our attention to Heidegger as a source of key philosophical and political contributions that have shaped thought since his contributions in Beginning with Heidegger (2020). I came across Millerman via Dugin, some of whose books he has translated into English. This book is a slightly modified version of Michael Millerman’s 2018 PhD thesis with the […]

Tags: #Heidegger #Millerman #Philosophy #Political Theory #Politics

Democracy and Development in Africa

While a visiting scholar at Brookings, Claude Ake wrote “Democracy and Development in Africa” (1995), published by Brookings. As nearly three decades have passed, I focus less on the specifics (e.g., agricultural policy recommendations) and highlight the general arguments, a few notes: “Many factors have been offered to explain the apparent failure of the development […]

Tags: #Africa #Claude Ake #Democracy #Development #Ideology of development

When McKinsey Comes to Town

As an expose of McKinsey, this book focuses on the most questionable and problematic aspects of the company’s work. Selection bias aside, the authors (Walt Bogdanich & Michel Forsythe) document a company seeking profits by any means: improving tobacco sales while knowledge the harmful effects, improving opioid sales amidst a peak of overdose deaths, human […]

Tags: #Capitalism #Consulting #McKinsey #Walt Bogdanich #When McKinsey Comes to Town

Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat

In search of a book about Egyptian political leaders, I came across very little. An earlier post covered a book by the spouse of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Amazon put me on to the book “Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat: The Presidents Who Shaped Modern Egypt” (2014) by Charles River Editors. Disappointing. Partly brief biography […]

Imagining Afghanistan

Quite a number of books have followed in the tradition of Edward Said, critiquing and contesting the manufacturing of narratives. Nivi Manchanda’s “Imagining Afghanistan” The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge” (2020) provides a deep dive into those narratives of Afghanistan. Chapters of the book explore the use of “tribe” and “tribalism”, the colonial construction […]

Tags: #Afghanistan #Colonial #Colonialism #History #Manufactured consent

God’s Unruly Friends

I discovered “God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period 1200-1550” (2006) by Ahmet Karamustafa largely by accident (it was a footnote in another book I had read). The title got me, but it sat on the shelf for a while until I got to it. The book itself is quite short, the […]

Tags: #Dervish #Deviant #History #Middle East #Social Norms