Month: February 2013

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New Books in Native American Studies - Frederick E. Hoxie, “This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made” (Penguin, 2012)

Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media’s breathless claims notwithstanding.

Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made(Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within — but not necessarily of— the polity that surrounded them.

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More or Less: Behind the Stats - A case of statistical significance in Greece

This week Ruth Alexander looks at the extraordinary case of Andreas Georgiou the head of the Greek statistics agency, Elstat. He is facing criminal charges for what amounts to statistical treason. It is a story that goes to the heart of the Greek debt crisis, that includes extreme office politics, alleged e-mail hacking and a statistician facing at least five years in prison. We speak to Economists Miranda Xafa and Professor Yanis Vourafafkis as well as Syriza MP Dimitris Tsoukalas. Also: do American football players die earlier than their fellow Americans?

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Start the Week - Al-Qaeda: Afghanistan to Mali

Bridget Kendall discusses the roots and reach of Islamist terrorism from Afghanistan to Africa. The historian William Dalrymple looks back to Britain's First Afghan War where many Afghanis rose in answer to the call for jihad. Nadeem Aslam's latest novel ranges across the Afghan-Pakistan border where the past and the present are locked together. Dr Christina Hellmich explores what has happened to al-Qaeda since Osama bin Laden's death. And as David Cameron calls the response to Islamist terrorism in North Africa a "generational struggle", the political analyst Imad Mesdoua looks at the parallels with Afghanistan.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

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World Book Club - David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

To mark the release of the acclaimed film of David Mitchell’s masterpiece Cloud Atlas around the world, there’s another chance to catch the multiple prize-winning English author talking about his dazzling novel.

With dramatic use of time-shifts and literary forms, Cloud Atlas circles the globe, reaching from the South Seas of the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future.

Offering an enthralling and often chilling vision of humanity’s will to power and where it will lead us, David Mitchell's deftly crafted novel follows the stories of six people whose lives interlock in subtle and mysterious ways.

So go see the film or even better read the book and listen for another chance to join Harriett Gilbert and writer David Mitchell to hear what readers both in the studio and around the world made of Cloud Atlas.