Human Capabilities
This is holiday season wherein the United States consumer complex pushes spending and waste. It may sounds frail for me, a librarian, to suggest books instead of mall trolling but I am backed up by Amartya Sen who explores human capabilities as an antidote to the cycle of poverty.
Nuruddin Farah, Somalian novelist, has a new book, Links (Riverhead Books, 2004). One character leaving prison after the fall of Siad Barre talks about healing and that "I dreamt at one point that I was setting very, very many small things right." With Iraq so gut-wrenching on an hourly basis and my shame at being in a nation that would so heedlessly put so many at risk it is a bit of comfort to try and put small things to rights. Maybe this will start to add up as a nostrum to the sanctimonious. African Review of Books .
