Archive | January 2017

The Rent Trap

Jan26

rent-trap-coverThe Rent Trap by Rosie Walker and Samir Jeraj
Published by Pluto Books in 2016

The Rent Trap explores the world of private renting and how rising house prices make home ownership out of reach for many renters. It looks at the instability caused by short term contracts and the impact on families. The book covers the de-regulation of the housing market and what that means for tenants.

Most landlords aren’t property developers. Most are individuals who’ve bought a second house as an investment for their retirements, or owner-occupiers renting a room to help with the mortgage payments. But what this means is that the people paying for the house aren’t the ones who’ll eventually own it and this is creating wide inequality. It’s interesting to see how individual small decisions, made for good reasons, create a huge problem in the absence of regulation.

Worth a read.

Shake Hands with the Devil

Jan19

shake-hands-with-the-devilShake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire
Published by Random House in 2003

I went to Rwanda last year on a work trip and it inspired me to learn more about the genocide in 1994. I visited the excellent Genocide Memorial and bought several books.

Shake Hands with the Devil is the memoir of the force commander of the UN mission to Rwanda. It starts slowly, with some time spent on Lt. Gen. Dallaire’s career and experience, but by the end of the book it is clear why this needs to be covered in such detail.

This is a book about the actions of the international community in response to the crisis, or, more precisely, the lack of action. As Dallaire describes his experiences in Rwanda and with the UN it becomes clear that there was a lot going on that he was not aware of until far too late. The politics surrounding the genocide – the relationships the Rwandan government forces and the Rwandan Patriotic Front had with France, the US, and other western countries independent of the UN, the domestic situations in those countries and the public tolerance for another foreign intervention, the under-resourcing of the UN – contributed to something truly terrible. Shake Hands with the Devil doesn’t exonerate the Rwandans who made this happen and the choices both sides made, but he does make clear how the structural, systemic issues in international relations supported and exacerbated those choices.

There is a tragic honesty in this memoir: Dallaire comes across as a man well and truly out of his depth. He lauds and celebrates the officers and soldiers assigned to the mission but doesn’t hide his own failings. Indeed, the early pages spent exploring his own experience serve to show how his lack of real conflict experience hampered him as well as demonstrating the abilities that qualified him for the role.

Shake Hands with the Devil is an eye-opening read. The exposure of the way the UN has to operate, and what that means for people it is supposed to help, is damning.

Devices and Desires

Jan12

devices-and-desiresDevices and Desires by K. J. Parker
Published by Orbit in 2005

Sentenced to death for innovating in a country that tightly controls its industry, an engineer, Ziani Vaatzes, escapes prison and flees to an enemy nation. Outside the Republic the warring duchies are much less technologically advanced, a situation the Republic desires to continue, so Vaatzes offers one of them his knowledge to build war machines. As the Republic is prepared to go to war to recover its errant engineer, the Duchy is in no position to refuse. But Vaatzes motives are more complicated than that. As this is the first in a trilogy, exactly what Vaatzes is up to is not clear by the end of the book, but by this point there have been many switches and double crosses.

Devices and Desires is a huge book, both in length (700 pages) and scope. Aside from Vaatzes there are a number of point of view characters and subplots, including a love triangle between warring duchies. It takes a little while to get going as Parker establishes his world but once it does I found myself quite reluctant to put it down. One aspect that annoyed me was the virtually entirely male cast of characters. Parker chose to write about highly patriarchal societies and I am tired of reading about them. I’d really like to read some fantasy that conceives of society in a different way. Recommendations please!

That aside, I enjoyed it. Devices and Desires is complex and Parker manages to keep the intrigue up right to the end. There’s more going on than is revealed, and it still isn’t revealed by the end of the book. I may at some point pick up book 2 to find out.

The Secret State

Jan5

secretstateThe Secret State by Peter Hennessy
Published by Penguin in 2002, updated in 2010

The Secret State is about Britain’s secret plans to respond to an attack on the UK during the cold war and beyond. It covers the rationale behind investing in nuclear weapons and why UK governments chose that rather than a civil defence programme.

It is a fascinating book full of detail from Peter Hennessy’s conversations with key political figures as well as information from documents of the time no longer secret. It makes sense of where we find ourselves now with the Trident programme and the reasons it is hard for governments to make a different choice about it now. It didn’t change my views about Trident and nuclear deterrence but it did help me understand the reasoning behind arguments in favour of it.

I found it quite amusing/terrifying that a large part of the rationale for a British nuclear capability was that governments in the immediate post-war period thought that the US was more likely to start World War III than the USSR, and an independent British nuclear capability would ameliorate that. I wonder if our current government still thinks that.

This is an interesting and informative read and I really enjoyed it.