Mermaids and Ikons - Gwendolyn MacEwen

A short poetic memory of her time in Greece.  She evokes some nice images and some playful ideas.  You can here the 60s speaking in their search to break out of Anglo constraints.  You can also hear the long gone Greek coffee shops with music on the old Danforth Avenue in Toronto.  A forgotten world.

White Boy Shuffle - Paul Beatty

Another darkly humorous look at stereotypes of both black and white contemporary culture.  This time Beatty's focus is largely on black ghetto cultural stereotypes - gangs, robberies, basketball, sex.

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

Essay on his experience as a black man in America.  Baldwin was way ahead of his time.  In this book he is discussing ideas that are currently creating a stir in the news.  His underlying point is how can you see yourself as part of a country when the country wants to exclude you, deny you, kill you.

The Sellout - Paul Beatty

Black American current novelist.  I found the book a bit hard to get into but eventually it carried me along.  Beatty is basically looking at modern black America and critiquing self-created stereotypes, self-assigned social roles, and dropping his characters into roles that are not usually seen as "black".  He gets his humour out of mixing up and poking fun at these stereotypes, self-created or otherwise.
His main focus here is black social intellectuals, with a very funny side on bringing back slavery...

Our Kind of Traitor - John Le Carré

Another brilliant book by Le Carré.  The story unfolds in a creative structure.  Current time, debrief time moving back into the past, current time. 

Central premise is the links between Russian criminal gangs and government.

Great characters.

Putin Country - Anne Garrels

An interesting look at a middle-sized city in central Russia, near the border with Kazakstan.  Garrels visited the city over several years for extended periods of time, made friends, got inside the society a bit.   It is an interesting look at the lives, attitudes and perspectives of different kinds of people living in the city.
You get a sense of how life can be harsh there - the role of corruption, the power of money, the indifference of the State, families alone in a sea of opportunistic individualism.  She gives you a sense of the blind spots, the places where ideas and reality don't match, where rhetoric wanders off from basic realities.  It is interesting to see where nations' mythologies diverge from historical and actual reality - there is something tragic in the Greek sense lurking in these dark spots.
The city was one of the Soviet's centres of nuclear technology, and there are endless stories about pollution and contamination ignored, denied, hidden.  It is still a very toxic environment.

The book reminds me of another social idea (wish I could remember the book).  When a society experiences a prolonged period of oppression, exploitation and fundamentally dishonest leadership, social and moral bonds eventually break down, leaving everyone operating as an isolated agent.  The example sighted in the source book is southern Italy and Sicily.  This type of social structure is very persistent and rebuilding social trust and social morals seems to be next to impossible.   Modern Russia as the result of a century of Soviet Communism and Putin's kleptocracy. 

The Global Minotaur - Yanis Varoufakis

An interesting look at the crash of 2009 and the post WW2 economic order in the west.  Varoufakis writes well on what could otherwise be a boring or obscure (or both) topic.

His central idea is the idea of profit recycling.  There will always be nations that accumulate more wealth, that will be more developed - what keeps the system in balance is some mechanism (often an investment mechanism, either private or government) that cycles some of the surplus wealth back into the poorer or less developed areas.  A classic example of this is the US Marshall Plan after WW2, and their heavy investment in Japan after the war.    U.S. excess wealth was recycled in the form of low-interest government and business loans. 

In the 60s, as the U.S. become a debtor nation instead of a surplus nation, a more complex system was developed, where profits of U.S. surplus trading partners came back into the U.S. either as government bond purchases or as investment in Wall Street.  This money was used to provide loans to government, companies and individuals to support development projects but especially high levels of consumption through debt - which in turn benefited trading partners... An ingenious system.  However, when the banks got greedy and started high risk lending practices, the house of cards collapsed when consumer liquidity collapsed.   With the collapse of the U.S., this leaves the whole system without the necessary recycling mechanism, which explains the very slow recovery of the world economy to date.

Varoufakis maintains that that the biggest weakness in the E.U is that there is no similar recycling mechanism for distributing excess wealth from Germany in particular.  This leads to inevitable collapse as the less developed nations become poorer and poorer.  German and French banks also indulged in risky lending practices similar to American banks.

Varoufakis is not a popular guy.  I suspect his ideas are too challenging for the status quo economists and politicians...