Month: August 2014

A volume in the series: Cornell Studies in Money. The list of books is available on this website: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu Editors: Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner Publisher: Cornell University Press – 250 words Book Review (A Second View) by: Paiso Jamakar With a long list of books published over the last ten years on the dire prospects for the United States dollar, I was surprised to read so many positive-sounding titles of the chapters in this book The Future of the Dollar, published in 2009. The eight contributors (including editors Helleiner and Kirshner) have written ten chapters in this book,...

Author: Julie Stephens Publisher: Columbia University Press – 186 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram Julie Stephens defines maternalism broadly as “the application of values, usually associated with mothering to the society as a whole. According to this view, the principles of nurture, care, and protection are suffused with rich ethical and political meanings and offer an alternative conception of the social.” She laments that “maternalist ideas have been in decline,” especially since the sixties when feminism, woman power, and equal rights for women were big issues in the heydays of  student activism on the Vietnam War, police brutality,...

Author: Jonathan Rees Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press – 236 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram Nowadays, we take refrigerators and freezers in our homes for granted. But preserving food, especially meat, from spoiling was a crucial need until refrigeration was invented in the nineteenth century. So it took a long time to learn how to produce “cold” but its opposite heat, was discovered thousands of years earlier. Cold is the absence of heat, and what a refrigerator (and similarly an  air conditioner) does is remove heat from a confined area. A refrigerator, called a “fridge” for short, consists of a thermally-insulated compartment...

Author: Elisabeth Roudinesco. Translated by Rachel Bowlby Publisher: Columbia University Press – 181 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram Today people in America and other Western nations rely increasingly on medications to alleviate psychic distress, rather than to find the root causes of their mental and nervous conditions with the help of psychoanalysts, Elisabeth Roudinesco writes in this eye-opening book. She points out that there exists in our “depressive society” an epidemic of distress that is being made worse by the increasing use of more and more drugs such as Prozac, Viagra, Zoloft, and others. The mindless use of...

Author: Oystein Tunsjo Publisher: Columbia University Press – 288 pages, plus Bibliography and Index Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram Perhaps no other book out there takes as close and detailed a look as this one does, at how China has secured, and continues to secure oil (Oystein Tunsjo uses the world ‘petroleum’) supplies, as well as kept open its access to those supplies. In this book he shows us how China has taken wise and smart actions, among others, and: Developed sophisticated hedging strategies to insure against risks in the international oil market Managed a growing net oil import...