Download or read book The Reproach of Hunger written by David Rieff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as “invaluable…a substantial work of political thought,” (New Statesman) in a groundbreaking report, based on years of reporting, David Rieff assesses whether ending extreme poverty and widespread hunger is truly within our reach, as is increasingly promised. Can we provide enough food for nine billion people in 2050, especially the bottom poorest in the Global South? Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and aid and development experts forecast an end to the crisis of massive malnutrition in the next decades. The World Bank, IMF, and Western governments look to public-private partnerships to solve the problems of access and the cost of food. “Philanthrocapitalists” Bill Gates and Warren Buffett spend billions to solve the problem, relying on technology. And the international development “Establishment” gets publicity from stars Bob Geldorf, George Clooney, and Bono. “Hunger, [David Rieff] writes, is a political problem, and fighting it means rejecting the fashionable consensus that only the private sector can act efficiently” (The New Yorker). Rieff, who has been studying and reporting on humanitarian aid and development for thirty years, takes a careful look. He cites climate change, unstable governments that receive aid, the cozy relationship between the philanthropic sector and giants like Monsanto, that are often glossed over in the race to solve the crisis. “This is a stellar addition to the canon of development policy literature” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Reproach of Hunger is the most complete and informed description of the world’s most fundamental question: Can we feed the world’s population? Rieff answers a careful “Yes” and charts the path by showing how it will take seizing all opportunities; technological, cultural, and political to wipe out famine and malnutrition.
Download or read book The Theater of War written by Bryan Doerries and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked. The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.
Download or read book The Reproach of Hunger written by David Rieff and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2000 the world's leaders and experts agreed that the eradication of hunger was the essential task for the new millennium. Yet in the last decade the price of wheat, soya and rice have spiraled, seen by many as the cause of widening poverty gap and political unrest from the Arab Spring to Latin America. This food crisis has condemned the bottom billion of the world's population who live on less than $1 a day to a state of constant hunger. In The Reproach of Hunger leading expert on humanitarian aid and development, David Rieff, goes in search of the causes of this food security crisis, as well as the failures to respond to the disaster. In addition to the failures to address climate change, poor governance and misguided optimism, Rieff cautions against the increased privatization of aid, with such organization as the Gates Foundation spending more that the WHO on food relief. The invention of the celebrity campaigner - from Bono to Jeffrey Sachs - whose business-led solutions have robbed development of its political urgency. The hope that the crisis of food scarcity of food production can be solved by a technological innovation. In response Rieff demands that we rethink the fundamental causes of the world's grotesque inequalities and see the issue as a political challenge we are all failing to confront.
Download or read book Reality Hunger written by David Shields and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
Download or read book Swimming in a Sea of Death written by David Rieff and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. Rieff's brave, passionate and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it means to confront death in our culture. David Rieff confronts his feelings in relation to his motherandmdash;the guilt, the self-questioning, the sense of not having done enough. And he tries to understand what it means to desire so desperately, as his mother did to the end of her life, and to try almost anything in order to go on living.
Download or read book Capital and the Common Good written by Georgia Levenson Keohane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite social and economic advances around the world, poverty and disease persist, exacerbated by the mounting challenges of climate change, natural disasters, political conflict, mass migration, and economic inequality. While governments commit to addressing these challenges, traditional public and philanthropic dollars are not enough. Here, innovative finance has shown a way forward: by borrowing techniques from the world of finance, we can raise capital for social investments today. Innovative finance has provided polio vaccines to children in the DRC, crop insurance to farmers in India, pay-as-you-go solar electricity to Kenyans, and affordable housing and transportation to New Yorkers. It has helped governmental, commercial, and philanthropic resources meet the needs of the poor and underserved and build a more sustainable and inclusive prosperity. Capital and the Common Good shows how market failure in one context can be solved with market solutions from another: an expert in securitization bundles future development aid into bonds to pay for vaccines today; an entrepreneur turns a mobile phone into an array of financial services for the unbanked; and policy makers adapt pay-for-success models from the world of infrastructure to human services like early childhood education, maternal health, and job training. Revisiting the successes and missteps of these efforts, Georgia Levenson Keohane argues that innovative finance is as much about incentives and sound decision-making as it is about money. When it works, innovative finance gives us the tools, motivation, and security to invest in our shared future.
Download or read book Against Jovinianus written by St. Jerome and published by Dalcassian Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-12-07 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jovinianus, about whom little more is known than what is to be found in Jerome's treatise, published a Latin treatise outlining several opinions: That a virgin is no better, as such, than a wife in the sight of God. Abstinence from food is no better than a thankful partaking of food. A person baptized with the Spirit as well as with water cannot sin. All sins are equal. There is but one grade of punishment and one of reward in the future state. In addition to this, he held the birth of Jesus Christ to have been by a "true parturition," and was thus refuting the orthodoxy of the time, according to which, the infant Jesus passed through the walls of the womb as his Resurrection body afterwards did, out of the tomb or through closed doors.
Download or read book The Vegetarian Imperative written by Anand M. Saxena and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have learned not to take food seriously: we eat as much as we want of what we want when we want it, and we seldom think about the health and environmental consequences of our choices. But the fact is that every choice we make has an impact on our health and on the environment. In The Vegetarian Imperative, Anand M. Saxena, a scientist and a vegetarian for most of his life, explains why we need to make better choices: for better health, to eliminate world hunger, and, ultimately, to save the planet. Our insatiable appetite for animal-based foods contributes directly to high rates of chronic diseases—resulting in both illness and death. It also leads to a devastating overuse of natural resources that dangerously depletes the food available for human consumption. The burgeoning population and increasing preference for meat in all parts of the world are stretching planetary resources beyond their limits, and the huge livestock industry is degrading the agricultural land and polluting air and water. Continuing at this pace will bring us to the crisis point in just a few decades—a reality that threatens not only our current lifestyle but our very survival. This book shows us a way out of this dangerous and vicious cycle, recommending a much-needed shift to a diet of properly chosen plant-based foods. Any one of these arguments alone—personal health, worldwide hunger, and environmental degradation—provides reason enough to stop consuming so much animal-based food; taken together, they make an unassailable case for vegetarianism. The Vegetarian Imperative will make you rethink what you eat—and help you save the planet.
Download or read book A Bed for the Night written by David Rieff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timely and controversial, A Bed for the Night reveals how humanitarian organizations trying to bring relief in an ever more violent and dangerous world are often betrayed and misused, and have increasingly lost sight of their purpose. Humanitarian relief workers, writes David Rieff, are the last of the just. And in the Bosnias, the Rwandas, and the Afghanistans of this world, humanitarianism remains the vocation of helping people when they most desperately need help, when they have lost or stand at risk of losing everything they have, including their lives. Although humanitarianism's accomplishments have been tremendous, including saving countless lives, the lesson of the past ten years of civil wars and ethnic cleansing is that it can do only so much to alleviate suffering. Aid workers have discovered that while trying to do good, their efforts may also cause harm. Drawing on firsthand reporting from hot war zones around the world -- Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, Sudan, and most recently Afghanistan -- Rieff describes how the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, CARE, Oxfam, and other humanitarian organizations have moved from their founding principle of political neutrality, which gave them access to victims of wars, to encouraging the international community to take action to stop civil wars and ethnic cleansing. This advocacy has come at a high price. By calling for intervention -- whether by the United Nations or by "coalitions of the willing" -- humanitarian organizations risk being seen as taking sides in a conflict and thus jeopardizing their access to victims. And by overreaching, the humanitarian movement has allowed itself to be hijacked by the major powers, at times becoming a fig leaf for actions those powers wish to take for their own interests, or for the major powers' inaction. Rieff concludes that if humanitarian organizations are to do what they do best -- alleviate suffering -- they must reclaim their independence. Except for relief workers themselves, no one has looked at humanitarian action as seriously or as unflinchingly, or has had such unparalleled access to its inner workings, as Rieff, who has traveled and lived with aid workers over many years and four continents. A cogent, hard-hitting report from the front lines, A Bed for the Night shows what international aid organizations must do if they are to continue to care for the victims of humanitarian disasters.
Download or read book In Praise of Forgetting written by David Rieff and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, "inoculate" the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times--the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11--Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.
Download or read book Feeding the Hungry written by Michelle Jurkovich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. In Feeding the Hungry, Michelle Jurkovich examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. Drawing on interviews with staff at top international anti-hunger organizations as well as archival research at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the UK National Archives, and the U.S. National Archives, Jurkovich provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy. In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right—the right to food—Jurkovich challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, Feeding the Hungry provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.
Download or read book More of God written by R.T. Kendall and published by Charisma Media. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will train you to seek God first and His righteousness before seeking healing, restoration, good finances, and other needs.
Download or read book At the Point of a Gun written by David Rieff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veteran journalist David Rieff’s essays draw a searing portrait of what happens when the grandiose schemes of policymakers and human rights activists go horribly wrong in the field. Writing for publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to The Nation to France’s Le Monde, David Rieff witnessed firsthand most of the armed interventions since the Cold War waged by the West or the United Nations in the name of human rights and democratization. In this timely collection of his most illuminating articles, Rieff, one of our leading experts on the subject, reassesses some of his own judgments about the use of military might to solve the world’s most pressing humanitarian problems. At the Point of a Gun raises critical questions we cannot ignore in this era of gunboat democracy. When, if ever, is it appropriate to intervene militarily in the domestic affairs of other nations? Are human rights and humanitarian concerns legitimate reasons for intervening, or is the assault on sovereignty a flag of convenience for the recolonization of part of the world? And, above all, can democracy be imposed through the barrel of an M16? This is not an optimistic report, but the questions Rieff raises are of the essence as the United States grapples with the harsh consequences of what it has wrought on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Download or read book The Givers written by David Callahan and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look at the secretive world of elite philanthropists--and how they're quietly wielding ever more power to shape American life in ways both good and bad. While media attention focuses on famous philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Charles Koch, thousands of donors are at work below the radar promoting a wide range of causes. David Callahan charts the rise of these new power players and the ways they are converting the fortunes of a second Gilded Age into influence. He shows how this elite works behind the scenes on education, the environment, science, LGBT rights, and many other issues--with deep impact on government policy. Above all, he shows that the influence of the Givers is only just beginning, as new waves of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg turn to philanthropy. Based on extensive research and interviews with countless donors and policy experts, this is not a brief for or against the Givers, but a fascinating investigation of a power shift in American society that has implications for us all.
Download or read book Socialist Realism written by Trisha Low and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Trisha Low moves west, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better”—someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one's life comes to the fore—sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won't find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?
Download or read book Reply to Faustus the Manichaean written by St. Augustine and published by OrthodoxEbooks. This book was released on 2018-08-04 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written about the year 400. [Faustus was undoubtedly the acutest, most determined and most unscrupulous opponent of orthodox Christianity in the age of Augustin. The occasion of Augustin's great writing against him was the publication of Faustus' attack on the Old Testament Scriptures, and on the New Testament so far as it was at variance with Manichæan error. Faustus seems to have followed in the footsteps of Adimantus, against whom Augustin had written some years before, but to have gone considerably beyond Adimantus in the recklessness of his statements. The incarnation of Christ, involving his birth from a woman, is one of the main points of attack. He makes the variations in the genealogical records of the Gospels a ground for rejecting the whole as spurious. He supposed the Gospels, in their present form, to be not the works of the Apostles, but rather of later Judaizing falsifiers. The entire Old Testament system he treats with the utmost contempt, blaspheming the Patriarchs, Moses, the Prophets, etc., on the ground of their private lives and their teachings. Most of the objections to the morality of the Old Testament that are now current were already familiarly used in the time of Augustin. Augustin's answers are only partially satisfactory, owing to his imperfect view of the relation of the old dispensation to the new; but in the age in which they were written they were doubtless very effective. The writing is interesting from the point of view of Biblical criticism, as well as from that of polemics against Manichæism.--A.H.N.]
Download or read book Jeffrey Sachs written by Japhy Wilson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of Sachs’s schizophrenic career, and the worldwide havoc he has caused. Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many faces. A celebrated economist and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he is also no stranger to the world of celebrity, accompanying Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie on high-profile trips to Africa. Once notorious as the progenitor of a brutal form of free market engineering called ‘shock therapy’, Sachs now positions himself as a voice of progressivism, condemning the ‘1 per cent’ and promoting his solution to extreme poverty through the Millennium Villages Project. Appearances can be deceiving. Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid is the story of an evangelical development expert who poses as saviour of the Third World while opening vulnerable nations to economic exploitation. Based on documentary research and on-the-ground investigation, Jeffrey Sachs exposes Mr Aid as no more than a new, more human face of Dr Shock.
