Bookworm Corner

Left to die in the sun after her birth because her mother didn't want another daughter, Fawzia Koofi survived to become the Afghan parliament's first female deputy speaker as well as head of its women's affairs commission. Despite being hounded by death threats, she intends to run for presidency in 2014.

In her book “The Favored Daughter”, Koofi recounts how her mother grew close to her, life in Afghanistan under the Russians and the Taliban, the loss of murdered family members, and her journey into politics.

Here she writes about challenges facing women and about poverty in Afghanistan:

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Competing French and Anglo-Saxon models of charitable intervention are under the spotlight in a new book assessing the future of humanitarianism in the 21st century.

“Many Reasons to Intervene: French and British Approaches to Humanitarian Action,” delves into the history of humanitarian work, paying special attention to groups operating within the United States, Great Britain and Switzerland, publisher Columbia University Press said.

The study “reveals existing forms of action that Médecins Sans Frontières, Médecins du Monde, and others have perfected over time and through rigorous trials,” the publisher said on its site.

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In conflict zones worldwide, people are subjected to different forms of torture. Here the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E Mendez, author of new book on torture “Taking a Stand,” discusses the issue of solitary confinement:

In conflict situations, regimes apply solitary confinement as a central feature of a policy of forced disappearances or to destroy the personality of opposition leaders; insurgent forces maintain hostages in forms of solitary confinement that are especially cruel because of the harsh physical conditions.

Solitary confinement has come back in spite of the fact that already in the nineteenth century it was discredited as a form of treatment of detainees. 

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If you want to know about international health care, you’ve got to know about the politics.

Focusing on the politics of the industry, “Global Health Watch 3 - An Alternative World Health Report” looks into water and sanitation, access to medicines, mental health, nutrition, and war and conflict, publisher Zed Books says on its website.

“In an increasingly globalised world with new cross-border threats to public health and widening disparities between populations, civil society actors are challenging the existing structures of global health policies,” Zed Books writes.

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By Alex Perry

Does aid work? After half a century of giving billions of dollars to Africa and Asia, donors are finding the answer is often no.

The reasons are well known: ignorance, inefficiency, corruption and the creation of dependence and disincentives to business. There is also rising unease about the way modern aid feels unnervingly like a giant business.

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HIV/AIDS was identified three decades ago, but conspiracy theories still hamper treatment of the virus affecting some 33 million people.

A new book, due out in March 2012, “The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back”, aims to clear up some of the misconceptions surrounding the illness and its treatment.

Author Nicoli Nattrass sheds light on AIDS denialism, the belief HIV is harmless and that antiretroviral drugs are the true cause of AIDS, the book’s publisher Columbia University Press says on its website.

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As climate experts worldwide fight for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, other people have come up with more radical ideas to beat climate change: bouncing sunlight back to space by pumping nanoparticles into the atmosphere, launching mirrors into Earth’s orbit, or thickening and brightening our clouds.

In "Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control", author James Rodger Fleming traces the history of rainmakers, rain fakers, weather warriors and climate engineers.

Through the "tragicomic" story of weather control, the sky can become a dangerous experiment, the publisher Columbia University Press says in its synopsis of the book.

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Billions of dollars in aid and military assistance has poured into Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion but the country remains plighted by poverty, poor healthcare and conflict.

Examining aid policy and military strategy in the state, a new book – "Afghanistan - How the West Lost Its Way" – argues the intervention lacked strategic clarity and coherence and that the international community has failed in its efforts to quell problems in the nation where conflict has uprooted millions of people:

“Afghanistan remains a nation riddled with warlords, the world's major heroin producer, and the site of a seemingly endless conflict between Islamist militants and NATO forces,” Yale University Press, the publisher, says in its online summary of the book.

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As the global population hurtles towards the 7 billion mark this year, people are asking whether the world has enough natural resources and food supplies to sustain that many of us.

But a book due out in September – ‘The No-Nonsense Guide to World Population’ – says when it comes to resource shortages people should focus not so much on the amount of people living on the planet, but on how people live and share their supplies.

In her book, published by New Internationalist, author Vanessa Baird delves into topics including women's reproductive rights, the growing elderly population and global warming as she argues it’s not all about the numbers.

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As the situation in East Africa reaches media headlines across the world, the obvious questions are popping up: How could this be happening again? How could this not have been prevented? Why are we going back to the 1980s, with famine reaching such large scale, affecting 11.6 million people?  

But the answer in turn is not easy to accept, as this is one of those “we told you so” moments.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) - set up following Ethiopia’s 1985 famine as a mechanism to prevent its recurrence - has for the past nine months been forecasting the threat of famine in the region.  But donors did not respond. (Never mind that the present number of those affected in East Africa is equivalent to the population of Greece, who themselves have secured a multi-billion pound bail-out from the EU.)

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Western governments and aid agencies need to transform the way they manage efforts to alleviate global poverty, argues journalist Augusta Dwyer in a new book titled "Broke but Unbroken: Grassroots Social Movements and Their Radical Solutions to Poverty" (Fernwood Press).

Rather than relying on handouts from the wealthy to solve problems created by the wealthy themselves, poverty alleviation can be achieved by the poor through grassroots social movements, she says. Dwyer cites examples in Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina and India to illustrate her thesis.

Dwyer, who spoke to AlertNet in Toronto, is author of "Into the Amazon: Chico Mendes and the Struggle for the Rainforest" and "On the Line: Life on the U.S.-Mexico Border".

Credit: Julie Mollins/AlertNet

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A year and a half after an earthquake in Haiti killed more than 300,000 people and left 1.5 million people homeless, more than 800,000 Haitians still live in makeshift camps where health conditions are appalling and deadly diseases like cholera have proliferated.

In his new book, ’Haiti After The Earthquake,’ Paul Farmer, founding director of healthcare charity Partners in Health and the United Nations’ deputy special envoy in Haiti, visits the rubble-strewn capital, Port-au-Prince, in the immediate aftermath of the Caribbean country’s quake.

"If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti — and we knew it,” Farmer, a medical anthropologist and physician, and a professor at Harvard University, told the National Public Radio (NPR) on Tuesday.

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Mobile technology has profoundly changed the way we communicate in everyday life, and after the 2010 Haiti earthquake it also become clear that it can be a vital means to give information to survivors of disasters.

A new book now sheds light on how mobile technology can also be used as a powerful tool for conflict prevention and management.

"Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management", edited by Marta Poblet from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, brings together experts and practitioners from fields such as mobile technologies, information systems, computer sciences, online dispute resolution and law.

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"You are lucky you're a woman. It is against our tradition to kill women," the militia leader told Suraya Sadeed, an Afghan-born woman, who, so appalled by a news report about a refugee camp in her home country, decided to take action.

In an excerpt of her book, "Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse", published in Britain's Telegraph newspaper on Sunday, Sadeed recalls the journey by truck and camel to deliver 10,000 blankets to Heshar Shahee camp.

After being abandoned by her driver in the no-man's land between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and coming under fire from teenage gunmen on pick-ups who want to seize some of the aid as "tax", Sadeed turns her anger on the militia leader, earning herself the veiled warning and a "murderous look".

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