The discerning reader’s essential read
© 2010 FiveBooks, an intelligent general reader
FiveBooks Interviews
In 2002 Michael Peel moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to become the Financial Times’s West Africa correspondent. His first book, A Swamp Full of Dollars, is the story of how Nigeria was shaped by the oil that pumps through western cities. A mixture of reportage, oral history and investigative journalism, it exposes the unseen consequences of reckless resource extraction. It has been nominated for the Orwell Prize. He says that if you’ve lived in a country which isn’t under a dictatorship and move to a country that has been for most of the last decade, you inevitably wonder how it is that these bloodthirsty pantomime figures came to be running the place. The dictator doesn’t become a dictator overnight, it’s a step-by-step thing - people who were genuinely admirable liberation-style heroes can turn into despots over time.
Peter Kellner has been a political analyst, commentator and columnist for the past 30 years, and is now president of the internet panel polling company YouGov, which floated for £18 million in 2005 and has profit margins far higher than most of the market research industry. He is a long-term member of the Labour Party, but YouGov polls, which electronically survey invited participants, have been criticised by Labour politicians – possibly because the findings are thought to have broken a pattern in which traditional polls in the UK tend to overstate Labour support.
The awardwinning Israeli novelist and playwright positions himself among the Israeli new historians, critical of the way Israeli history has been told. ‘Usually with Israel we tell ourselves that in the 48 War the Palestinians ran away and didn’t want to come back. In some cases the situation was quite different.’ He chooses books on Israel/Palestine.
Harvey Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement and on Soviet espionage in America. He has received a number of awards, including Emory’s Thomas Jefferson Award in 1999. He was recently nominated to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities.
Trevor Phillips is a politician and broadcaster, who has spent the last seven years at the head of quangos responsible for combating discrimination. After growing up in London and Guyana, he was the first black president of the National Union of Students and the first leader of London’s elected assembly, where he clashed with Mayor Ken Livingstone for arguing that multiculturalism could mean more segregation in British society. He is current chairman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and has also advised the French government on social cohesion.
Professor Alison Wolf is an authority on education and the labour market. She has criticised post-war politicians for believing that increased spending on state education will automatically lead to economic growth. Education, she writes, is good for the individual but is not a panacea for society’s ills.
Steven Katz is Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University, where he holds the Alvin J and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies. He was Chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Museum for five years and remains on the committee. He is one of the American representatives to the International Task Force on the Holocaust, established by the King of Sweden. He is the editor of the journal Modern Judaism, and has served on the editorial team of The Cambridge History of Judaism and The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought. He is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Jewish Research and the Academy of Jewish Philosophy.
Marko Rakar is the chief executive manager of the consulting company MRAK Services Ltd and has a lifelong experience of working in the media, new and old. He has run a number of campaign races, including that of recently elected Croatian President Ivo Josipovic. He says people don’t understand that the brilliance of the Obama campaign was to engage voters in real life. He got 68 million votes. They broke all the records because it was a completely different campaign. They tried to create 68 million different conversations and allowed people to organise themselves to talk.
Adam Foulds is a novelist and poet whose most recent novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 and won the 2010 Southbank Show Award for Literature. His ‘verse novella’ The Broken Word, an epic poem set in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, won the Costa Poetry Prize in 2008. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2008.
Hugh Thomson is an explorer, film-maker and writer who believes the world is not as thoroughly explored as we like to believe. His most recent book is Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico, now available in paperback.