Mammon's Kingdom

David Marquand is one of England’s most emblematic political figures -

journalist, historian, (briefly) Labour MP and Brussels Eurocrat, University professor, Oxford University Principal and contributor to think tanks galore. Most importantly, he has been for many decades our foremost centre-left public intellectual, taking up arms against the corruption of our society by unprincipled, uncaring, neo-liberal marketisation and the resulting decline of the public realm.

No one (except Tony Judt) has voiced the anxiety of the progressive citizen with greater passion or power, or with more compelling scholarship. His Britain Since 1918 – the strange career of British Democracy  was, for me, the most compelling portrayal of the country’s political development I have ever read. And, to complete, the identikit, he is actually the spitting image of Alan Bennett.

I have just finished his most recent short book - Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now whose review by Kenneth Morgan, the key historian of figures of the British left, forms the core of this post. The book's theme -

is the commercialisation of our culture and institutions. This has been most destructive since the Thatcher years, but, fine historian that he is, he shows that the roots lie much earlier, with the close link between finance and the state since Hanoverian times. There was a sharp reversal during and after the Second World War, when a new “clerisy”, variously composed of social critics like George Orwell, progressive civil servants like William Beveridge, working-class patriots like Aneurin Bevan and the Communist Arthur Horner recaptured the public ethic of Ruskin, Mill and Arnold.

The rot set in with disciples of economic individualism after 1944, pursuing the mirage of a free-market utopia along with (Marquand believes, perhaps more contentiously), a destructive “moral individualism.” Since then, the cohesion and self-belief of Britain as a comity have been undermined. Marquand analyses superbly the implications of this.
·         A sense of history has been replaced by a glib, uncomprehending journalistic "presentism".
·         A humane Keynesian-style economics has been supplanted by a dogmatic cult whose followers uphold an unthinking, unjustified faith in the impregnable rationality of the market, and the abstract "choices" allegedly open to a rational calculating individual.
·         Communal institutions such as local authorities or the civil service are degraded by a market state. Public values are driven out by an all-encompassing commercialism, as shown variously in the debasement of our universities, the sacrifice of sanity on the environment, and the undermining of the welfare state.
·         The Gini coefficient marches ever upwards, the increasing poor are isolated and humiliated, mass inequality is inescapable.
·         Our democracy is relentlessly eroded by lobbying corporate capitalism, resulting in a tax structure skewed in favour of the rich and a political structure debased by invasion by private wealth. Marquand describes the "revolving doors" through which ex-politicians glide effortlessly into the capitalist utopia, a process most notoriously symbolised by Tony Blair.
·         Worst of all, society is being atomised, riven by class division, its language of cohesion debased by the cheap slogans of media commentators, its sense of belonging, neighbourhood and human sympathy shredded everywhere, from the church to the public library to the bus queue.

We no longer seem to know each other. And so we no longer trust each other. Public goods and services, long taken for granted, are withering into commercialised decay. We have made a cheap, corrosive society, a world fit for Fred Goodwin to shred in.And the tragedy is, as Marquand shows, that much of this is due to moral surrenders by those previously in authority – the "flunkeyism" of civil servants, the avarice of professions (look at current vice-chancellors), the "charismatic populism" of politicians from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron who have destroyed the values they inherited. 

The manifold evils of the process are beyond dispute. But wherein lies the remedy? Here the book is rather more disappointing. The answer, it seems, is "a wide-ranging national conversation", in which the ideas upheld by philosophers past, notably Burke, Mill, Tawney, are proclaimed anew.
The themes for this kind of nationwide seminar are of unquestionable value. Burke, for long an improbable hero for conservatives, is rightly rescued as a celebrant of the social roots of living communities, and a prophet of cultural pluralism whether in Ireland or India. They are to be backed up by two less likely camp-followers – Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, the greatest prophet of the inexorable advance of monopoly capitalism, alongside the prophet of the priesthood of all believers. 

But donnish dominion, like patriotism, may not be enough. We need action as well as conversation. We have now a contrasting critique of the inherent inequalities of the capitalist order from Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He prescribes specific radical policies – global action on higher incomes and tax avoidance, annual taxation on wealth and property, help for working-class victims like a stable minimum wage, a restoration of labour unions.

The difference between Piketty and Marquand may be one of national culture. It is Gallic rage versus Anglo-Saxon sweetness and light.But Marquand has the roots within him to go much further. The book is dedicated to his father, Hilary and his great-grandfather, Ebenezer Rees. They were very different kinds of Welshmen – Hilary an economics professor at Cardiff, Ebenezer a journalist who founded the first Welsh socialist newspaper, Llais Llafur (Voice of Labour). What they had in common was that both were full of radical ideas on how to repair their fractured society.Perhaps Marquand's next work could recapture the values of the land of his fathers, to rebuild that "richer, deeper democracy" which our poor, corrupted country so desperately needs. 

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste - part 2

Reader – while you have been busy this last 24 hours or so, I have been sweating blood on your behalf! A few minutes ago, I reached (with a great sigh of relief) the last page of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste and its pages will forever bear witness to my reactions and interactions – with savagely pencilled circles and slashes on almost every page.

The subject of this book could not be more important – the process whereby a doctrine (neoliberalism), assumed in 2008 to have been totally discredited, has managed not only to survive but to become the only game in town…

On your behalf I have (carefully) read 358 pages of text; glanced at 52 pages of notes; and noted with interest a 41 page bibliography. And I have also turned up at least a score of fairly long reviews – indeed even one special issue of a journal devoted to the book (available at the hyperlink of the book’s title) which, usefully, contains an author’s reply. The book's (mercifully short) conclusion poses these questions-

·         What were the key causes of the crisis?

·         Have economists of any stripe managed to produce a coherent and plausible narrative of the crisis, at least so far? And what role have heterodox economists played in the dispute?
·         What are the major political weaknesses of the contemporary neoliberal movement?
·         What is the current topography of the Neoliberal Thought Collective?
·         What lessons should the left learn from the neoliberals, and which should they abjure?
·         What would a vital counternarrative to the epistemological commitments of the neoliberals look like?

But the book touches (and briefly at that) only on the second and fourth of these questions – the others he suggests “demand lavishly documented advocacy and lengthy disputations” and maybe an alternative left project.

His book, he concludes with surprising modesty for such a pyrotechnic writer, simply “dispels some commonplace notions that have gotten in the way of such a project”.

He then goes on to a final one-page summary of the 6 reasons why “neoliberals have triumphed in the global economic crisis” -
·         Contrary evidence didn’t dent their world view
·         They “redoubled their efforts to influence and capture the economics profession”
·         “everyday neoliberalism” which had “taken root in our culture provided a bulwark until The  “Neoliberal Thought Collective”  (NTC) could mount further responses”
·         The NTC developed the black art of “agnotology” (see below) and -
·         “coopted protest movements through a combination of top-down takeover and bottom-up commercialisation and privatisation of protest activities and recruitment”

and… finally…..wait for it…..
·         ”The NTC has displayed an identifiable repeating pattern of full-spectrum policy responses to really pervasive crisis which consists of short-run denialism, medium-term imposition of state-sponsored markets and long-term recruitment of entrepreneurs to explore scientific blue-sky projects to transform human relationships to nature”…….

GOT IT?

I really am trying to be fair to this guy – but he really does hoist himself with his own petard.

And, dear reader, you should know that I studied economics for 4 years at university – and then attempted to teach the subject to students….

Furthermore, I pride myself on my vocabulary…..but I was stumped by so many words –

Ambagious, apophenia, “all the Finnegan that is needed”; perfervid, quiddity (a favourite); astralobe, scofflaws, epigones, fugleman, lucubrations, bombinate, deliquesce, Nascar, echolalia, echoic, ukase, catallactic, hebetude, cunctuation, coadjurancy, snafus, non-ergodicity, defalcation, hazmot, political donnybrooks

He was, however, kind enough to proffer (at page 226) a definition of“agnotology” (to which an entire section is devoted) - namelythe “focused study of the intentional manufacture of doubt and uncertainty in the general populace for specific political motives”.

And he does also explain a couple of other neologisms – “murketing” and “buycott” (both of which my automatic speller annoyingly tries to correct)

“Dissention” at page 243 presumably is “dissension”. You see, Reader, the efforts to which I have gone for you!

I am glad to report that I am not the only reader to be appalled at Mirowski’s style – a year ago an Economist columnist took issue with the book for this reason and sparked off quite a discussion thread

The reader is still entitled to expect something better than the following (from Philip Mirowski's new book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste"): Yet the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis. 

That is not just a mixed metaphor; it is meaningless and pretentious at the same time. One would nominate it as the world's worst-written sentence but it is only the opening clause. After a semi-colon, the author drones on for a further 32 words, from which Economist readers should be spared. Just a few pages later, Mr Mirowski produces another monstrosity:The nostrum of "regulation" drags with it a raft of unexamined impediments concerning the nature of markets and governmentality, and a muddle over intentionality, voluntarism, and spontaneity that promulgates the neoliberal creed at the subconscious level.

What happened to the editing process at Verso, which allowed this book to be published? All authors benefit from a trimming of their stylistic excesses. The odd flourish is fine and an attempt at humour in a work of financial analysis is usually welcome. But this does not consist of adding one clause after another, or piling adjective upon adjective.  Such leaden prose weakens any hope that the author might have of persuading the reader to slog through his 467-page attack on neoliberalism. George Orwell's rules of writing (which introduce The Economist's in-house style guide), are always worth repeating

One of the discussants in the subsequent discussion thread suggested four reasons for verbosity:

1) Try selling a one-page book. This despite the fact most of what I have read on economics in recent years, and indeed ever, could comfortably fit - too many books are just one interesting insight smeared over 400 pages ("Black Swan" anyone?).

2) Obscure language can hide deficient or trivial underlying thinking (think academic prose, esp. in the humanities)

3) Author's pseudointellectual wankerdom, and halo effect of "clever" language intended to boost persuasive effect. This is patently counterproductive.

4) Attempted argument by verbosity - while single-sentence phrasing would be just as informative, droning on about it from different angles for twenty hours of reading is intended to be more effective in helping the ideas (or lack thereof) sink in. 

The Dog that didn't Bark

A pile of journals and books was waiting for me on and under my neighbour’s table when I arrived back on Sunday at the mountain house – not just the blessed London Review of Books and (less honoured) New Statesman but the first couple of issues of a professional journal to which I am now resubscribing - Public Administration – an international quarterly. This used to be my staple reading in the 1980s and 1990s – along with The Political Quarterly and many others – but the increasingly narrow scope and leaden prose of such academic journals had driven me away about 15 years ago.

If only for their book reviews, however, they are an important way of keeping me in touch with what professionals in my field are thinking about – no matter how their choice of subjects are so often distorted by the competition for academic promotion. So the delights of The Political Quarterly have also started arriving – and I am also thinking of renewing my acquaintance with the journal Governance 

Amazingly Wiley publications which owns these journals is offering (for those who already are subscribing to one journal in their Politics stable) a 30 day free trial viewing of all of the Politics journals in their stable – about 100 – archives and all! So that will keep me fairly quiet in the next few weeks

My pile of books included half a dozen on Turkish matters (by coincidence I was invited last week into a bid for a project in the country) and a fat book called Never Let a Serious Crisis go to Waste – how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown 

The book’s opening pages annoyed me no end. Most (of the considerable number of) reviews have been very positive but one caught my feelings exactly -

Mirowski’s aggressive yet obtuse writing style seems designed to alienate casual readers, cuts off discussions of potential alternatives out of the current morass, and ironically paints too positive a picture of where orthodoxy stands at the current moment.

But I will have to persevere since, like most people, I have been too casual in my use of the term and do need to understand why social democrats are so powerless in face of this phenomenon. Three years ago I wrote an article on this – called The Dog that Didn’t Bark which appeared in a special issue of Revista 22(a Romanian journal) which was commemorating 09/11

At that time, Colin Crouch was one of the few people who had devoted a book to the question (The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism)

Three years on, a lot more people have written about it and Philip Mirowski (the author of the latest) reviewed some of them in the journal I referred to recently.

Mirowski has helpfully put online one of the key sections of his book – the thirteen commandments of neo-liberalism - which allows you, reader, to see for yourself what I mean about the convoluted style. He can also be heard on some ipod interviews here, here and here
And Colin Crouch himself has returned to the charge in a (free) article Putting Neoliberalism in its place in the current issue of Political Quarterly.

I hope to write more about the book’s contents – and reception - shortly

The Dog that didn't bark

I delivered this morning my contribution to the special issue which the Revista 22 journal is running next week to mark the 10th anniversary of 09/11. I changed the title to "The Dog that didn't bark" (the title of a Sherlock Holmes episode)to refer to the strange inability of all those active in the anti-globalisation movement 10 years ago (so well described in Paul Kingsnorth’s One No, Many Yeses (Free Press 2003) to use the global financial crisis to present an alternative vision - let alone mobilise people for change. Previous posts carried the initial text for the article - it now continues -

Democracy requires political and administrative systems to have the capacity to make an impact on what its citizens judge to be unacceptable conditions. But it’s not only governments, corporate power and the media which are failing us – propelling us faster toward the precipice. We are actually failing ourselves. Our collective will to act as local, national and international citizens has weakened enormously over the past decade – despite our being presented in the financial crises of the past few years with the most powerful evidence for systemic change. In 1999 we had the Seattle anti-globalisation demonstrations and annual conferences. But, after the Genoa Conference of 2001, the movement disintegrated. Why? For, as the various financial scandals (eg Enron) of the 2000s culminated in the global meltdown of 2008, it seemed that the scales dropped at last from everyone’s eyes. The neo-liberal Emperor had been exposed in all his nakedness. So surely we now had the shared political understanding and will to return to the State some at least of the functions which had been stripped from it by those under the influence of dogma.
Indeed for a moment there seemed the possibility of developing greater legitimacy for alternative social visions more consistent with basic principles of democracy and collective dialogue and action. Not only did this not happen - but the high ground, amazingly, was quickly recaptured by corporate warriors who saw the State rescue of the banking system as an opportunity to “reframe” the agenda for their benefit. State debts had increased and had therefore, went their argument, to be reduced – but through the dismemberment of the last vestiges of the civilising aspects of state activities. Colin Crouch is one of the few who has recently identified and analysed the perversity of this stunning development (in his brilliantly titled book The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism (Polity 2011) – pointing out, for example, the confusion large corporations have successfully sown in the public mind as they use the language of “the market” to defend their anti-competitive (let alone anti-social) practices. Richard Douthwaite put it very pithily in his 2003 Short Circuit The system that has emerged suits nobody: in the long run, there are no winners. Even at the highest levels of society, the quality of life is declining. The threat of mergers leaves even senior managers in permanent fear of losing their jobs. As for the burgeoning list of billionaires, try though they might to fence themselves off from the collapsing social order, they cannot hide from the collapsing biosphere. Neither social democratic nor green opposition parties offer, however, any convincing agendas for change. Such agendas are available (A draft paper Working for Posterity on my website identifies many of them) but need to be proselytised by those who recognise that the issue is not the simplistic one of greater State power but rather the need for a proper balance of power between corporations, state structures and people-driven political processes. “It was not capitalism which triumphed when the Berlin wall fell – it was balance” was the opening sentence of a powerful but neglected 2000 article by management guru Henry Mintzberg which set the European model of the “mixed economy” - of the “strong private sector, strong public sector and strength in the sectors between” - against the lack of balance and of “countervailing power” in the so-called communist societies. “The current push to privatise everything will”, he warned then, “lead to the same disease as communist societies”. It is the apparent powerlessness in the face of disaster which is the most frightening of current trends.

the cancer eating us

In Just Words a sceptic’s guide to administrative vocabulary I sounded off about how words can take over our thinking – and offered some definitions. Here’s a great illustration from the Real World Economics blog-

I am tired of economists, policy makers, and others mentioning markets. As in “let the market decide” or “we should let the market heal itself.” Enough. Markets are us. They are not great mysterious forces. They are not abstractions hovering in mid air. They are not supply and demand. They are not amorphous inanimate systems. They are not mechanisms.They are none of these things.
Markets are people. Sometimes lots of people. Sometimes a few people. Without people there are no markets. Sometimes working well. Other times not so well. Sometimes rigged. Sometimes not rigged. Each unique because the people that comprise it are different. Sure we can mimic them. We can model them. We can identify some regular characteristics of transactions that seem to occur whenever people transact. But we cannot get rid of the people in a market.
People matter. They can change the properties we see as regularities if they so choose. They can collude. They can organize. They can interfere with each other. They can exclude others. In other words markets are human made. They reflect people. And what people want to do. Markets do not exist to impress upon people. People impress upon markets. Markets do not dictate what we do or how we do it. We dictate what a market is and how it works. We are the market.
The allure of the abstraction is that it diverts our attention from the people who animate the market. Thus it is convenient for a policy maker to talk about a market correction instead of having to say someone lost money or their job. It sounds less threatening. It is certainly less humane.
And letting “the market heal itself” is simply an obscure and sanitized way of saying that some ore of our fellow citizens are about to lose their jobs.

over the past two years, nearly all the countries suffering from the current economic crisis have been busy rescuing with public money the profit-driven financial institutions that were responsible or co-responsible for the crisis in the first place (Stiglitz, 2010). Often created by central-bank fiat, these public resources had been long denied to, and are now not being utilised to fund, life-protecting and life-enhancing institutions, such as ambulance services, public hospitals, old-age pensions, university research, international aid, or primary schools (Halimi, 2008). Quite the opposite, public investments are being reduced across the board in order to secure the money-measured value of existing assets and keep treasury bonds attractive to institutional investors.

This is an excerpt from Your Money or Your Life - one of several papers by Giorgio Baruchello which have appeared recently in an Icelandic journal and which have introduced me not only to his clearly written critiques of the new financial capitalism which is attacking us in a cancerous way but to his generous summaries of two other big Philosophy names for me – John McMurtry (Canada) and Martha Nussbaum (US). Good and Bad Capitalism was an earlier paper which summarised Nussbaum’s 2010 book on the affect of the neo-liberal cancer on the body university – sweeping away as it has all remnants of humanities studies and requiring everything to be justified by its service to the world of commerce and profit-making.
McMurtry himself is an interesting character – who has an interesting and provocative autobiographical essay on his experience in universities here

can neo-liberalism be defeated?

The aftermath of the death of a laptop and the purchase of a new one may be annoying and time-consuming - with all the software downloading and file and website transfer it involves. It does, however, also has its positive side. It makes you look at many of the papers, files and websites which were just lying in the database! One of the papers I came across was a Compass pamphlet Breaking out of Britain's neo-liberlism produced in January 2009 and written by Gerry Hassan and Anthony Barnett (the latter the editor of the admirable Open Democracy website).
Given what I said in my last post, I thought it was worth excerpting some of it -
Across British public life, in public institutions and discourse, the last decade of New Labour has been characterised by the debasement of values and meaning. To talk about the future of our society we have been obliged to walk through a linguistic supermarket where sterile, vacuum packed in-words are provided by the supply-lines of the new elite. This has had many casualties, as government white papers and documents once renowned for their plain English have become inflated by gobble-de-gook obesity. Economic development agencies have abandoned talking seriously about political economy, and instead invoke “creativity”, “innovation” and “doing the step change”. Think-tanks evacuated any efforts at considering political economy. University departments scrambled for research funding by peer assessing each other’s publications in journals of barely-read-studies. City-wide and regional bodies stressed their aspirations to be “world class cities” basing their growth forecasts on shopping and tourism while discarding the solid revenues of manufacturing provincialism. In all parts of the UK, from London to Liverpool, Glasgow to “Newcastle/Gateshead”, this has been an age of gloss and superficiality and financial considerations based on “neverland”.
This debasement of our language and public discourse has been mirrored by the triumphalism of our political classes. The belief in “the end of decline” in the political elite has seen the shift from Britain being seen as “the sick man of Europe” to a country which from the mid-1980s “put the great back into Britain”.
Neo-liberalism bent and contorted all of Britain’s political parties, institutions and philosophies, while changing the notion of “the self” as personal neo-liberalism psychologised and individualised every issue and concern. These developments have seen the slow, gradual entrenchment of the neo-liberal order across all British public life, to the extent that people advocate and voice its values often without realising it.
The current set of events, uncertainty and instability shows the failure of the world that neo-liberalism brought about. This is an historic opportunity and challenge to all of us: whether we be progressives, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, or just concerned about the future of Britain and the world.

SEVEN INITIAL STEPS TO BEGIN TO CHALLENGE NEO-LIBERALISM:
1. We need to identify “the official future” – the mantra of globalisation wherever it is – nationally, internationally, in the public and private realms, and critique it, defeat it and supplant it;
2. The world view of the bloviators – the Malcolm Gladwells and others – who have offered themselves as voices and apologists for the winners and the global order, needs to be seen as part of the problem, along with the damage they have done and their role in legitimising the “new conservatism”;
3. Government and public agencies need to fundamentally rethink how they conceive and think of policy, the language and values in documents, and whose voice and interest such processes are serving;
4. The British “public” overall does not see itself in the language of “consumers” and “customers” in relation to public service. For the last thirty years, the public have been force-fed a diet of New Public Management, choice and privatisation, and still they don’t find it attractive or buy it. Sadly nor do people see themselves in the idea of “citizens”. We need to think, nurture and organise public services in new ways which are neither New Right nor the technical fixes of co-production;
5. There is a direct link between the micro-policy and management of the Blair-Brown years – legislation “overload” and command and control – and the suffocating consensus of the mainstream, which shuts down open discussion of the macro-questions about the economy and society;
6. The nature of the British state is fundamental to the current crisis and laid the basis for the acute nature of the problems Britain faces in the global downturn. The British regime formed over the thirty years of Thatcher to Brown has seen an inter-twinning of the economic, social and political into a neo-liberal state and polity that commands the loyalty of all the main parties. An escape route has yet to be discovered given the closed nature of the British system.
7. Any such escape needs the people of the United Kingdom to make their own claim upon public power with a modern form of citizenship which aids an emancipatory state, culture and society. This will involve a political culture and system which recognises the centrality of fundamental human rights that protect minorities as well as a modern liberty that stops the development of an authoritarian, database state. All of which will require a way of retelling and reimagining the stories of the peoples and the nations of the UK.

OK the first steps are rather shaky and tentative. The writings of David Marquand are relevant to point 6 - and the Power2010 movement to the last point. I hope the two come back to these issues - soon and more coherently - and with a braoder European dimension.

A treatise on our present discontents

Today’s literary discovery – thanks to one of my favourite websites - - is an essayist called Joseph Epstein who muses about the approach of death in a very elegant yet simple essay - Symphony of a lifetime - . And some civilised reactions from readers
I googled him but found only one of his 19 books - On Friendship – which looks delightful. Amazon has a few – and I have put a couple of his collections of essays on writers in my basket.

The day has dawned bright – but still chilly. No signs here of the volcanic ash (from an Iceland volcano) which has grounded half of Europe’s planes. Political leaders are stuck all over the place – Angela Merkel having to drop into Lisbon (shades of Candide) on her way back from the States; the Portugese President in Prague; the Swedish PM apparently ruling the country by twitter in another airport! John Cleese makes a 3,500 euros taxi journey. The UK running out of fruit. Shows you the vulnerability of our systems these days.

Tony Judt’s ILL fares the Land – a treatise on our present discontents is a stunning essay by one of our best historians on how far western societies have fallen in the last 30 years in the pursuit of efficiency. Doom and gloom books are ten a penny these days – full of ecological disasters, commercial greed, academic simpletons and political pygmies. Prescriptions are rather more rare (Will Hutton and David Korton are exceptions). Probably only a historian can give us this sort of perspective on how the model of “social democracy” which seemed to have emerged a stunning victor in the ideological struggle of the 20th century so quickly was consigned, in its turn, to the waste basket. And with what catastrophic results. Of course, we have heard the story of neo-liberalism and its legacy many times before. But, generally, from journalists, economists or campaigners in a fairly strident manner. Judt suggests the story is a bit more complicated – with the new left having to shoulder considerable blame for its stress in the 1960s on “rights”. However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasising these carries an unavoidable cost; the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Gated communities are the result.
The book’s language is simple to the point of elegance – probably because his debilitating illness required it to be transcribed from his spoken word. But the words (and chapter headings and sub-headings) reflect the vast range of his reading and knowledge. This is a very rare book in which a highly intelligent and sensitive historian takes stock of what he has learned in his life - in an effort to give the younger generation both a memory and some hope.
I was initially disappointed at the smallness of the book – but its contents and message and the format given to it by the publisher make it a book to treasure and consult for a long time to come.