Bedsit, with three clowns, and a rottweiler

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How to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie. A review and some thoughts.

Dale Carnegie's 1936, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People,' has remaining in continuous print since 1936, selling over 30 million copies. Something is selling here. Carnegie has distilled a distinct ideology one deeply ingrained in the Western corporate world’s ethos of mandatory optimism. While Carnegie's insights are not inherently flawed, their luminescence casts a particularly dense umbra. Carnegie's book aligns with something we know about ourselves, echoing George Orwell's observation: 'The best books tell you what you already know.' The book plays into our innate longing for acceptance and affirmation, fostering a confirmation bias where we gravitate towards ideas that affirm our pre-existing beliefs. Reading Carnegie I could not help thinking of it's antithesis. Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' (1949) delves into the perilous consequences of such biases. Willy Loman, epitomises the tragic fallout of conflating charm,...

Americanah a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a hymn to the complexity of our emotional lives. It is a novel where many things are said, but these are the things that I heard; 1) there is comfort in cheap chocolate. 2) she shows us how arbitrary brutality pervades our world and some of this is not intentional cruelty; it's just the systemic faceless kind. 3) Harm is a temporal thing, it can happen in an instant and we'll live with it for the rest of our lives. This is obvious in a car crash, but here it is of the emotional kind. Growing into a malignant burden that corrupts the rest of our relationships, and each of us kills the things we love. 4) It's a book about place and identity that rails against those narrow confines of identity. Her characters resist all attempts to be defined or sully themselves in narrow trenches of how to be. 'Ring out false pride in place and blood' 6) Adichie is a woman, who knows her place and that place is among the classics. She has a character joke about the...

Republic of Shame by Caelainn Hogan

Caelainn Hogan's Republic of Shame tells us what we all knew. Everyone knew. Everybody knew and either denied that knowledge or explained away their actions as they took part in it. Everybody knew but determined that it was a inescapable act of nature, like the rain. And when we say everyone knew, not only did everyone know women where being unlawfully imprisoned in mother and baby homes and Magdalen Laundries, everyone knew (including the state) that the rates of death in these mother and baby homes far exceeded that of babies and children in any other place in Irish society at the time. Church, State and public knew they were dying of neglect. But when circumstances changes and when children could be sold, they stopped dying, then they had a value and could be sold to 'good' families. As one survivor ruefully observes, 'When we illegitimate Irish Bastards were suddenly worth more than the cows on the farms, we stopped dying by the thousa...

Quichotte a novel by Salman Rushdie

This is a joyous book, a happy book and while there is plenty of sadness here, it holds it's sadness lightly. It's a classic, in the classic sense, since it deals with the classic themes, of family, love and estrangement. Quichotte does not only deal with the obvious romantic loves, but with the love between a brother and sister. Of how when siblings are estranged, not present, not spoken of, beyond our awareness, shut away in secret compartments in our minds. Their absence shapes our thoughts in ways we are scarcely aware of. The love in our lives and the indelible marks it leaves on us, is the theme I found most prominent in this book. 'Life was short and each day of love stolen from it was a crime against life itself.' Quichotte is full of the whimsical, full of surrealist motifs. Occasionally, they appear a little too conspicuous, but their obviousness only serves to heighten the underlying humour. This was my first time re...

Difficult Women. A History of Feminism in 11 Fights by Helen Lewis

Helen Lewis' 'Difficult Women.' casts a cold eye on the feminism it chronicles. A cold, but open, realistic and human eye. The kind of eye that adds depth and understanding. Lewis tells the stories of those women who have been written out of feminism history, women such as Erin Pizzey, founder of the charity Refuge, a service that has supported tens of thousands of women to escape violent homes. Admittedly Pizzey's current opinions are objectively distasteful, but is that a reason to ignore the good she has done? Lewis points to the lesbian feminists, whose stories are strangely absent, most likely willfully ignored. Women like Maureen Colquhoun, Jackie Foster and Babs Todd. Their contribution is not limited to gay rights or feminism, they have dragged our community towards greater kindness and civilization. Lewis argues that contemporary feminism is afraid of complex stories and here she probably has a point. However, when she extends the explanation for thi...

Half of a Yellow Sun a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was inspired to pick up this book after listening to Chimamanda's 2022 Reith Lectures on the Freedom of Speech. Chimamanda, argues that it feels like freedom of speech is under attack. She names cancel culture, arguments about “wokeness" (I am old enough to remember when we called this political correctness) and the stabbing of Salman Rushdie as producing this atmosphere. Meanwhile, autocrats, populists and an anti-science identity culture have undermined the very notion of an accepted fact-based truth which lives above politics. So how do we calibrate freedom in this context? 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' is as profoundly human, as it is unsettling. The terror and the domestic are cheek by jowl. They live side by side, in the same spaces. I have heard it said that Iris Murdoch's contribution to ethics is that she (along with other feminist philosophers) reframed ethics from the public to the intimate. Similarly, Adichie's narrative highlights that ethics canno...