June 2008 Archives

Strictly speaking, this wasn't a second hand book shop, but more of a stall, at a village fete. Regardless, I was able to nab Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and, curiously, Experimental Design and Statistics by one Steve Miller. All paperback, all for fifty pence each. Two pounds for four books. A couple of them are a little tattered, but for 50p I can hardly complain!

I first read Lord of the Rings when I was 11, and I've been a big fan of the series ever since. Despite that, I've never owned my own copy (for shame!), and I'm glad to finally get it. It's a one-volume copy, with the all-important appendices and index. I was just flicking through it this morning, and I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into it again.

I've never read Gulliver's Travels, but I'm familiar with the story and many of the satirical themes in it. As such, I'll allude to it in conversations when I want to sound intelligent and educated. Which is a little hypocritical. So maybe I should read it. Which is why I got it. And it's a damn good book, or so I hear.

I'm even more unfamiliar with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, although I've seen Apocalypse Now. Which is the same thing, right?

Experimental Design and Statistics may seem like an odd choice, but that's almost exactly the name of a course I'm enrolled in at uni, so I figured it could be useful. Looks like it's mainly from a psychological perspective, which is alright - methodologically, experimental linguistics has a fair bit of overlap with psychology.

Four books for two pounds. Not bad, not bad at all.

So, Canada apologises for forcibly separating hundreds of thousands of indigenous children from their families and sending them to abusive boarding schools (see also). About time, I say. It's about time that the state recognises historical human rights abuses for what they are. Yet I'm still left with a sour taste in my mouth. It strikes me as too little, too late. An apology is a great step forward, but it's just words. "Let deeds, not words, be your adorning," wrote Baha'u'llah (Hidden Words #5 from the Persian). So where are the compensation payments to the affected families? How is the Canadian state today trying to tackle institutional racism? What is being done to address the segregation and wealth gap between whites and natives? Where, in short, is the justice?

Events like this remind me of Australia's apology over a similar policy towards the indigenous people there (see also), and Norway's apology for their sterilisation of their Roma (Gypsy) population, which was ongoing from 1934 to 1977 (sorry, no links). No reparations were paid in these cases either.

And as far as I know, there has never been any apology for Russia's long-running abuse of indigenous Siberian peoples, which dates as far back as the 17th Century and as recently as the Soviet Era. The world is a tough place.