Books
Looking at a lazy long weekend? Here are some books worth considering:
Small Giants
- Bo Burlingham
It’s a widely accepted axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, some entrepreneurs have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do . . . creating a great place to work . . . provid-ing great customer service . . . making great contributions to their communities . . . and finding great ways to lead their lives. Go deep inside fourteen remarkable privately held companies, in widely varying industries across the country, that have chosen to march to their own drummer.
Capacity Development in the International Development Context:Implications for Indigenous Australia
- Janet Hunt
This paper traces the interest in capacity development in the fi eld of international development and explores themes which may be of interest for those seeking to build greater capacity in Indigenous Australia.1 It teases out what is meant by capacity development, examines what studies and experiences of capacity development reveal about successful approaches, and offers some thoughts about what all this might mean for approaches to capacity development in Indigenous Australian communities and organisations.
Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
- George Lakoff
This book is the antidote to decades of conservative strategising and the right wing's strangle hold on political dialogue in the United States and around the world. Lakoff explains in detail exactly how the right has managed to co-opt traditional values in order to popularise its political agenda. He also provides examples of how the centre-left can address the community's core values and re-frame political debate to establish a civil discourse that reinforces progressive positions.
The Collapse of Globalism
- John Ralston Saul
Despite the near-religious conviction with which it was originally conceived, a growing vagueness now surrounds globalisation and its original promises. The Collapse of Globalism contends that this signals the end of an era in which a minimalist economic value was applied to all social, political and development questions. Saul suggests that now is a unique moment in which we can influence the values and direction of the international community into the future.
Silencing Dissent
- Sarah Maddison, Richard Dennis, Clive Hamilton
It is widely accepted that a well- functioning democracy is not limited to elections every
three or four years but involves a continuing process of consultation between
government and the citizenry. Non-government organisations (NGOs) serve as essential
intermediaries between community and government. Recently, however, the legitimacy of NGOs and their contribution to democratic processes has been under attack.
Growth Fetish
- Clive Hamilton
For decades our political leaders and opinion makers have told us that higher incomes are the way to a better future. But after decades of sustained economic growth we must confront an awful fact: the people are still not happy. This fact is the great contradiction of modern politics. Growth Fetish argues that, far from being the answer to our problems, growth fetishism lies at the heart of our social and environmental ills.
The Water Dreamers: The remarkable history of our dry continent
- Michael Cathcart
The ways Australians live and think have been shaped by water — or rather by the lack of it.
The Water Dreamers tells the story of the settlement of Australia and how our culture has been shaped by the scarcity of water and by the need to fill the imagined silence of the continent with the sounds of civilisation. It's the story of who we are today as much as a history of how the country grew.
The Water Dreamers is an illuminating look at the ways people have imagined and interpreted Australia while struggling to understand this continent and striving to conquer its obstacles. It's an important work of environmental and cultural history with an unmistakable sense of how, today, we are part of that continuing story.