Archive for August, 2021
How can one possibly understand the complex and tragic history of Afghanistan?
August 16th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
One way is to read these three magnificent novels by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini: “The Kite Runner” – my review here “A Thousand Splendid Suns” – my review here “And The Mountains Echoed” – my review here
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How do we make any kind of sense of the current cataclysm in Afghanistan?
August 15th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Seven years ago, I read and reviewed a book titled “Zone Of Crisis: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran And Iraq” by Amin Saikal (2014). These are extracts from my review as it related particularly to Afghanistan: Afghanistan and Pakistan are predominately Sunni states, while Iraq and Iran have a Shia majority population (the only such countries in the […]
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As the Taliban rush to complete their retaking of the control of Afghanistan, we should remember how this all started
August 15th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Twenty years ago, I read and reviewed the book “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil And Fundamentalism In Central Asia” by Ahmed Rashid (2001). This is what I said: Rarely can a book have been so timely and so topical. Rashid is a Pakistani journalist who has been writing about Afghanistan for over 20 years. His book was […]
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Has storytelling become more opaque?
August 15th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I recently wrote a blog posting suggesting that it had. Now I’ve just read a fascinating book called “The Science Of Storytelling” by Will Storr (2019) in which there is a sentence that I think supports my view that serious storytelling has become more opaque or challenging: “Expert readers understand that the patterns of change they’ll encounter in art-house […]
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A review of “The Science Of Storytelling” by Will Storr (2019)
August 15th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I love being told stories (my favourite genre is the cinema and I reckon I’ve viewed around 3,000 films) and I enjoy writing short stories (I’ve produced 31 self-published under the title “The Rooms In My Mind”), so I found this a fascinating book which should help me both to analyse and to create stories. […]
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A review the new movie “The Suicide Squad”
August 13th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I’ve enjoyed many, many superhero movies and I’m sure I’ll delight in a few more, but some of them are becoming a bit ridiculous and this is one of them. Following the original “Suicide Squad” (2016) and the spin-off “Birds Of Prey” (2020), now we have a kind of reboot of the first movie with […]
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How diverse is the United States now?
August 13th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
America’s white population has declined for the first time, while US metro areas were responsible for almost all of the country’s population growth, according to groundbreaking data released on Thursday by the US Census Bureau. The rapid diversifying of the US was among the most notable findings of the census. Nationwide, the number of people who identified as white […]
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A review of the 2017 film “Downsizing”
August 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I had thought that this was one kind of movie but it turned out to be a rather different one altogether. I had imagined – based largely on the trailer – that it was some kind of romantic comedy starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig, both of which I enjoy as actors. At first, my […]
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A review of “The Secret Body” by Daniel M Davis (2021)
August 4th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
There is a certain irony that, a year and a half into the global pandemic when I finally fell foul of the coronavirus and had to self-isolate, top of my reading list was this book with the sub-title “How the new science of the human body is changing the way we live”. Although the author […]
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Some people say that we live in a new age of identity politics. But what is identity and why has it become more complicated?
August 1st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
The question of identity has troubled humans throughout the 200,000 history of humankind. Just who are we and what makes us different from other humans and how important are those differences? In evolutionary terms, for most of human history, identity has been a relatively simple matter. But, since the age of civilisations emerged some 5,000 […]
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