In a world obsessed with telegraphing personal or corporate expressions of virtue, this book forces us to contemplate what constitutes moral leadership for the collective good on a world scale.
Irrespective of whether you find Kissinger’s version of the past and his role within it persuasive, the erudition and crispness of his prose and his laser focus on how we navigate this historical juncture when the world order is shifting is simply too good to miss. Kissinger forces us to engage a wider purview, one that confronts the complexity of moral decision-making and the relationship to exemplary leadership of currently unfashionable ideas of service, faith, and character.
Great leaders, he reminds us, are empowered by deep literacy and, fundamentally, by deep-seated faith in the future and in those they lead.
Henry Kissinger analyses how six extraordinary leaders he has known have shaped their countries and the world
'Leaders,' writes Henry Kissinger in this compelling book, 'think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead. They must balance what they know, which is necessarily drawn from the past, with what they intuit about the future, which is inherently conjectural and uncertain. It is this intuitive grasp of direction that enables leaders to set objectives and lay down a strategy.'
This might look like a children’s book, but it is statecraft and diplomacy in action. It expresses big, radically transformative ideas in words simple and charming enough that they can beguile a 10-year-old child.
I was handed the book by its author, Aimée Craft, an Anishinaabe expert on water and professor at the University of Ottawa. She has written with élan and poise a book that is simultaneously ceremony, lesson, and meditation. It conveys the power and value of treaties as the basis of all relationships, treaties made between humans and water, sky and earth, as well as between peoples and animal nations. The aim of these sacred agreements is to ensure collective, reciprocal well-being, or mino bimaadiziwin.
Craft reiterates that vital sets of treatied interrelationships exist between all humans, grandfather sun, grandmother moon, and mother earth, that must be respected for life on earth to persist. So too, must the living treaties struck in the past between sovereign Indigenous nations, the Crown, and Canada be respected if Canada’s 1.96% of the earth’s surface is to play its essential role in world survival.
The first treaty that was made was between the earth and the sky. It was an agreement to work together. We build all of our treaties on that original treaty.
On the banks of the river that have been Mishomis's home his whole life, he teaches his granddaughter to listen-to hear both the sounds and the silences, and so to learn her place in Creation. Most importantly, he teaches her about treaties-the bonds of reciprocity and renewal that endure for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the rivers flow.
Accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Luke Swinson…
April this year, I found myself wandering around the MIT Museum shop in Boston, USA. I casually picked up this tiny, short book. Its theme, how can we organize a technological world we can live in, has stayed with me ever since. I was taking a break from a symposium at Harvard Law School about how to protect Indigenous intellectual property and intangible heritage in the coming AI revolution. Not being a lawyer, I felt like a fish out of water, but this book brought vital perspective.
Written by an MIT professor born in 1910, it explores how we’ve responded to technological change over time, and how it changes our affections. Morison perceived that machines establish their own conditions; they alter our consciousness. This makes it both foolish andsensible to resist innovation. He described the three stages we all go through as we resist innovation: ignoring, rationally rebutting, and name-calling.
The great challenge of our century, just as it was in Morison’s time, is how we ensure technology serves human ends rather than those of bureaucracies or machines.
An engaging look at how we have learned to live with innovation and new technologies through history.
People have had trouble adapting to new technology ever since (perhaps) the inventor of the wheel had to explain that a wheelbarrow could carry more than a person. This little book by a celebrated MIT professor—the fiftieth anniversary edition of a classic—describes how we learn to live and work with innovation. Elting Morison considers, among other things, the three stages of users' resistance to change: ignoring it; rational rebuttal; and name-calling. He recounts the illustrative anecdote of the World War II artillerymen who…
For the first time, this book tells the story of the Canadian ‘pretendian’ Great War poet, Frank “Toronto” Prewett.War-induced trauma or “shell-shock” led him to adopt the identity of an indigenous North American, a self-representation accepted by some of the most significant literary figures of the time, including Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. The book explores the trauma underpinning this and other instances of the ‘pretendian’ phenomenon and investigates how trauma, and latterly PTSD, have been understood and treated across time. It makes the case for an abiding link between human pretending and the experience of rapid historical change, arguing that the adoption of a ‘soft’ primitivist ideal has always accompanied the experience of modernity.
