Indignez-Vous!
Stéphane Hessel
(Bilingual edition) translated by Damion Searls
Scribe 2011
ISBN: 9781921844225
$9.95
64 pp
Be Indignant! This is the call to action from a veteran of the World War II French Resistance. This is not a voice coming to us from the past but the current voice of a now still-feisty 93-year-old writing less than a year ago.
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I see him shuffling past the café window from time to time. Long, grey hair, a flannel shirt with buttons missing (summer or winter), corduroy trousers with the cuffs partly unravelled and hanging unevenly over his clean, black boots. I notice they are boots, not shoes, and that they are always clean and shining.
Essays on Muslims and Multiculturalism
Edited by Raimond Gaita
Text 2011
ISBN: 9781921656606
$26.95
192 pp
In some respects this is a timely book and at the same time it is a shame it was not available ten years ago, as it may have helped to inform the debate at a time that John Howard was trying to change the values we live by and the understanding we have of those values.
In human societies we make laws based on a set of principles which express how we feel about personal autonomy, freedom, power, individual rights and responsibilities, honesty, integrity, access to food and shelter, health and wellbeing and about the value of life itself. Why do we do this?
I was probably around fifteen years old when I experienced the death of the first relative I knew. He was my mother’s father – a grandfather I knew only for the less than two years we lived with my grandparents in the south of Nederland when I was around four. Even then I only knew him distantly. When he died, I had been in Australia for about seven years.
“ ‘Grandpa, get a life!’ That’s what Jed said to me the other day.”
“They’re all the same, these youngsters. They forget we have navigated our way through decades while they have less than two and they think they know it all.”
How do we negotiate the path between sanity and insanity, between right and wrong, between good and not-good, between the empowering and the disempowering?
I live in a well-to-do country and I live comfortably. A constant question for me is: how much am I willing to compromise and how much am I willing to give up for the benefit of the ‘environment’?
The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ
Philip Pullman
Text 2011
ISBN: 9781921758096
$23.95
245 pp
“Each of us can interpret a story in a different way, depending on our own unique life experiences. We may disagree with a story, agree with it, or learn something new from it. An author usually has a purpose for the story, and there are always some sort of underlying values behind the text he writes.”1
Recently, Number-One Daughter took a photo of the spoodle prostrate in front of a Buddhist statue. Was he praying or merely enjoying the sun on his hairy body? Or, the thought just struck me, he may have been offering obeisance to the Sun.