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FiveBooks Interviews
The Professor of Communication and Culture says music is a technology of the self, a set of tools and techniques which we use to work out harder at the gym or set the tone for a date. ‘I think anyone can relate to that. Can anyone bear listening to Phil Collins while they’re trying to pump some iron at the gym?’ he asks. He chooses five books on what music means.
The author of Torture and Democracy gives a harrowing interview on the effects of violence, torture and trauma on the human being. He says many army torturers can’t confess for fear of losing their pensions, and if they don’t confess they can’t get help. Torture, he says, is a slippery slope.
The author of The Happiness Hypothesis says there is an eternal battle between the Apollonian spirit of order and the Dionysian spirit of revelry and collective ecstasy. Even though Apollo has the upper hand in the West, you can’t stamp Dionysus out completely.
The bestselling author defines the existential origin of evil as the refusal to acknowledge and confront our own mortality. The murderer, he says, is the person who tries to avoid the inevitability of his own death by taking the power of life into his hands. He chooses five books that give a secular definition of evil, always intertwined with love.
The Professor of Culture says celebrity is all about displaying status. Charisma attaches itself not just to individuals but to people with a particular social position. A duchess must never be more than 100 yards from her carriage because you need a carriage in order to qualify as a duchess! Great monarchs of former history established their rule by being intensely visible in a series of processions and displays. He chooses five books on celebrity.
In this interview, which helps define an emerging political figure, possible Presidential contender for 2012 Mitch Daniels plants himself firmly on the dynamist, anti-traditionalist side of the conservative divide.
从《中国的好女人们》(The Good Women of China)、《天葬》(Sky Burial)、《见证中国》到即将出版的《中国母亲》(Chinese Mother，暂译)，薛欣然深入中国乡野，记录下那些被忽视的社会底层族群的故事，她说：”我要帮他们在历史里留下声音！”
Elizabeth Harris is a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University where she specialises in Buddhism. She says the Dalai Lama affirms that everyone likes happiness and not pain. He then stresses that this happiness must not infringe on the rights of others. And gradually he tells people what happiness really means – a happiness which is free from the craving for material things that Buddhism sees as the root of our suffering. Happiness, he says, can be about developing one’s own potential but it must have no conceit and pride about it. She chooses the best five books on Buddhism.
Margot Badran is a historian and gender studies specialist focusing on the Muslim world. She is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Senior Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding at Georgetown University.
British Lawyer Ahmad Thomson converted to Islam in 1973. He is a noted speaker on Islamic matters and an author of several books on the subject. Thomson is a member of the Murabitun movement, founded by Ian Dallas, and a member and co-founder of the Association of Muslim Lawyers. In 1994, he founded Wynne Chambers: one of the first chambers to specialise in Islamic law as well as English law. He has actively campaigned for elements of Muslim personal law to be accommodated by English civil law. He says a whole zone of knowledge about Islamic truth and its wisdom has been kept at bay, if you like, by established educational institutions in what’s called the West. He tries to redress the balance here.