FEAST OR FAMINE

Bike Riding in Kabul: The Global Adventures of a Foreign Aid Practitioner  by Jamie Bowman (2022) is the memoir of a  legal advisor in post-conflict and emerging market countries from 2002 to 2011. It covers Kosovo, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Russian Federation, Afghanistan, Southern Sudan, Rwanda, and closes in France.  Full disclosure: I have known the author, an attorney from California, since 2006, working together in Southern Sudan. Many countries mentioned in this book, I have also worked in – and I appear in this book! The prologue introduces characters that appear throughout most chapters of the book, one of whom the author met in 2002 in Kosovo – her starting point.    Her job – mainly related to updating national laws – was not an easy one. She explains the challenges with an anecdote from her work in Ukraine. An ancient Ukranian artist had drawn a picture of an elephant, and a rather simple, little one, from a description because he had never seen one – in ...

  The Judge’s List (2021) is set in Florida, America.    Investigator Lacy Stolze of the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct works to assess complaints against sitting judges. But she has never received a complaint like this one. Usually, she investigates bribes and corruption.    Jeri Crosby’s father was murdured in 1992. For 22 years, she has been trying to find her father’s killer. She knows it was a sitting judge, but she needs proof.    Proof is nearly impossible. This judge is patient, calculating, careful, evasive, and cunning. He is brilliant at erasing all evidence and remaining unknown as a suspect.    The judge has great patience and he is a serial killer – ‘he had waited five years to kill her father, nine to kill the reporter, twenty-two to kill Kronke, and approximately fourteen to kill his scoutmaster.’ Jeri is patient too. Now she needs the help of Lacy Stolze and the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct.   The judge hasn’t fi...

The Land Before Avocado: Journeys in a lost Australia (2018) is a comic review of Australia in the 1970s.  Glover begins in 1970 in Canberra, Australia, when Gus decided to put chairs outside his café so that his customers could enjoy pavement dining. It was illegal at the time, and the police were called. The public debate became known as The Battle of the Chairs, and Gus won. Gus’s café still exists today. This book has a million stories of 50 years ago in Australia, when life was different – Glover takes a look back at what used to be. Some things were serious then: women couldn’t get a bank loan, school canings were regular punishments, no-fault divorce did not exist, women had to resign from their job after marriage, human rights didn’t respect the rights of all humans, sewerage stank, and the life expectancy was 12 years lower. But there was a lot of joy too: kids could play all day – just ‘be back by dusk’ – children played ten different sporting games all...

First: Sandra Day O’Connor (2019) is the biography of America’s first female Supreme Court justice. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, she served on the Court from 1981-2006, twelve years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her on the bench in 1993. The biography begins on a cattle ranch in Arizona, where Sandra Day grew up, and in El Paso, where she attended school and lived with her maternal grandmother. Her sister Ann was born when Sandra was eight years old, and brother Alan arrived two years later. Sandra went to law school when someone suggested that she needed to handle her father’s business. When she graduated in law in 1952 and married John O’Connor, no firm was hiring women lawyers. When she moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1957 ‘you could fit all the women lawyers in Phoenix around a table.’ This biography outlines her career progression, her cases, and her character.  It also tells of her cancer diagnosis at the age of 58, and her husband’s Alzheimer’...

Sundance: The Robert Sundance Story (1994) is the memoir of Native American Indian Robert Sundance (1927-1993).  Sundance describes his life of alcoholism – from the time it started, to the 25 years living with it, and to his rehabilitation.  He writes of his Sioux roots – he was Lakota Sioux with Irish heritage – and his parents Mary Mad Bear and Henry McLaughlin, and brother Roland. He writes of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.  He was 15 years old in 1942 when World War II started, and he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy, where alcohol was free or cheap. When the Korean war started in June 1950, he was transferred to Korea with the American Air Force.  He writes of the time after the war in Billings, Montana. This is not a pretty picture as he spirals down and describes homelessness, bars, and whorehouses, leading to aimless drifting and causal violence.  Robert speaks openly about the death of many of hi...

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author of:-  Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author of:-  Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

The New York Times  published an article on 12 November 2018 with the headline: In Florida Election Standoff, Judge Urges Parties to ‘Ramp Down the Rhetoric.’ What does ‘ramp down’ mean?  What is a ramp? The Free Dictionary defines ramp as ‘an inclined surface or roadway connecting different levels’ or a ‘mobile staircase by which passengers board and leave an aircraft.’ An inclined surface rises or falls – depending on which way a person is travelling. For example, the  roadway inclined. Yet a declined surface or movement is a downward movement.  To ‘ramp down’ is definitely a downward movement, or a downward slope. The Collins Dictionary defines ‘ramp down’ as ‘to decrease or cause to decrease’ or ‘to decrease the effort involved in a process.’ What does the article say? The seventh sentence explains that the judge, the chief circuit judge in Florida county in America, Jack Tuter, says, during the county’s recount of the 2018 mid-term...

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author of:-  Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (2015) is the true story of the women who worked in a radium factory in New Jersey, America – painting the luminous dials on watches – from 1917 to 1938. Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898 and together won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Marie also winning the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemisty for pioneering research on radioactivity. They knew in 1901 that radium was harmful, but they were not fully aware of just how toxic it was: it was hailed as a precious wonder substance. When radium was available for commercial use in the early 20th century, it was described as ‘undark’ and ‘liquid sunshine’ because even a miniscule amount could cure cancer or provide a luminous glow that shone in the dark. It was the most valuable substance on earth, so who wouldn’t want to work in such a coveted job in one of the radium factories.  Beginning in 1917, the book centres around young women, such as 15-...