Politics Board Book, TV or Movie Recommendation Thread

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

The People of Democracy: Understanding Self-Determination on the Baisis of Body and Movement, by Henning Eichberg

Intercultural learning about democracy means translating the untranslatable. This book tries the impossible, telling about Danish and other experiences of democracy.

Democracy is not only a system of ruling and government, but an involvement of demos: "We are the people!" Without an understanding of what "the people" is, a deeper understanding of democracy cannot be attained.

The bodily practice of the people is a basis of their social life. Democracy can be understood with the patterns of movement, sport and game in mind. There is not only one single sport – sports are manifold, and so are democracies. When taking their destiny in their own hands, people act in togetherness that is based on the recognition of otherness.

By telling the contradictory story of democracy on the basis of body and movement, the book opens up for a new understanding of self-determination.

 

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread



Remember : The Journey to School Integration
by Toni Morrison ( who provided written commentary beside these meaningful, poignant pics) comments on this memorial children's book:

"...what was interesting to me about this period, in addition to everything else - the Supreme Court, the lawyers, the NAACP, all of these families filing suit, the marches, et cetera - [was that at] the center, at the forefront, on the front line...were children.

Little...children. Who were led into school, with guns, perhaps, and parents, but had to go in that building.
And stay there all day.
Alone; sometimes two or three [of them], and they did it, obviously, because they were told, but what they knew -- and this is what is extraordinary to me, was that they were doing it for something bigger than they were.

These people were eight years old, nine years old, ten years old. Just teen-agers, you know, in their little dresses and their little suits and going in these places, and then having grown people - you know what it’s like to be an eight year-old and having adults screaming at you, spitting at you? All right, when you got home, you were in your mother's arms and your father was there, you knew you had that support, but at the moment -- these were strangers. White women who were mothers could actually do that to another child? It really boggles the mind.

So, I was thinking how - not just the courage of that gesture, but it's unique. They were out front. And I wanted young people who were also eight and nine to feel the connection..."

There are people in my family, Toni, from eight and nine to eighty-nine, who were feel it through those awesome pics and those captions. In recalling how far we've come, Remember celebrates us all.

 

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

http://www.warmadeeasy.com/

 

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

The most important book of the decade; if you want to understand why the US does what it does under the leadership we're left with due to the winnowing and candidacy processes of which we mostly are not a part, read and internalize this book...

...or, just watch/listen here.

 

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

What's the atheist take on this?

 

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

Another great one. Presents history from a very different perspective.[/QUOTE]


Indeed; and in a nation ostensibly imbued with a governance system "by, of and for the people," why should this form of history, with voices from the people, be anything but the bedrock of our engagement with history, and not some marginalised "alternative"?

This is a great book. I'd like additional voices of regular people, of all stripes...that IS history.

 

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread



One of the great classics of the African Europhone canon is a text (originally published in French, in 1962) by the Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane: it is called (in its English translation) Ambiguous Adventure, published by Heinemann in their African Writers’ Series in 1972.

Kane’s novel describes the fate of the Diallobe people, who consider their Muslim culture as immemorially African and adequate to their situation. But then the colonial French domination of their society begins to require (according to the assimilationist policies of this European power) the education of their brightest and most promising youngsters, especially the exceptional child Samba Diallo, in French culture.

In his own culture, the child has been subjected to a course of training in Muslim theology which appears so harsh as to be akin to torture. “The child’s ear, already white with scarcely healed scars, was bleeding anew," we learn on the second page. Yet the physical pain to which the child is subjected does not damage him, because he loves what he is learning, loves and is loved and treasured by his teacher. But their sphere of spirituality is beset, they know, because “the woodcutters and the metal-workers are triumphant everywhere in the world, and their iron holds us under their law."

Yet among the Diallobes themselves, one of the most influential figures, known as The Most Royal Lady, feels that “the time has come to teach our sons to live." Inexorably, she and her brother, the chief of the Diallobe, realise their people are being pushed into a stark choice: to remain wholly dedicated servants of their God and starve or be enslaved, or to lose their God, the essence of their living culture, and ‘survive’. The inevitable conclusion, voiced by the Lady, is “that we should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall have left free." It is a choice which leaves them “labelled, conscripted, administrated."

The Knight, the great man who is Samba Diallo’s father, himself realises the homogenising effects of modernisation and Europeanisation: it is for a person or a people “to lose their original colours”, to merge into “the wan tint that filled the air roundabout." The Knight tells a French colonist: “Your science is the triumph of evidence, a proliferation of the surface. It makes you the masters of the external, but at the same time it exiles you there, more and more...”