Sunday, July 6, 2008

Freakonomics...

The 12-hour flight from KL to London allowed me to finish an interesting book on economics. Steven D Levitt, a 36 year old Professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Chicago admits that he does not know much about economics and neither is he good at mathematics or econometrics! In his view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but with a serious shortage of interesting questions....
His gift is the ability to ask such questions and by seiving through available data he obtained the answers to these questions
What really caused the decrease in crime rates in the 90's? Answer - the legalisation of abortion! Read the book to see how he came to this conclusion. And do you know that having a swimming pool at home is more dangerous than having a gun? He also showed that some school-teachers cheat to help their students at exams and that sumo wrestlers are corrupt. Levitt supervised Sudir Venkatesh, an Indian graduate in Mathematics from California in his Phd in Sociology and answered the question on why, if the crack (drug) dealers are so rich, yet they still lived with their mothers.
An interesting economics book for a non-economist like me.
Earlier in the month ( of June) I read ' In the Country of Men' by a Libyan author,(Hisham Matar)......which was shorlisted for the Booker Man Prize 2006. It tells the story of life in Gaddafi's Libya from the observation of a child whose father was involved in counter-revolutionary activities. It narrated how it affected their family, his parents relationship and his relationships to his peers. The description of a public execution by hanging ( broadcasted live on TV) of Ustaz Rashid, a counter-revolutionary agent, was so vivid, it sent a chill down my spine. It aroused the same chilling effect as when I had viewed the execution of Saddam Hussein on You-tube.
'Auto Fiction' is a novel by a young Japanese girl, Hitomi Kanehara. Born in 1983, she stopped school at the age of 11 and left home and started writing which she sent to her father who happens to be a literary editor. At 21, she wrote Snakes and Earrings which won her the Akutagawa Prize in 2004. The Japanese edition has sold 1 million copies and Auto Fiction is her second book which has been translated into English.
Auto Fiction is the story of Rin, a 22 year old girl, who, on her return flight from her honeymoon in Tahiti, suddenly developed a paranoid reaction that her husband was having a 'go' with the air stewardess in the plane's toilet. This is the story of a girl with paranoid psychosis, manic-depressive illness and borderline hysterical personality disorder all wrapped up in one. Reading the four chapters of the book is like reading the transcript of a patient in psychotherapy.
Recommended for students of psychiatry and psychology.

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