Historical ties go both ways. In many African and Asian countries influential political leaders, government bureaucrats, and military commanders who now hold the economic strings have often been educated and trained in the former colonial power; they value the relationships developed during those formative years. Recent research by IZA, the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, shows that African leaders, in particular, tend to work more closely with former colonial powers than leaders from any other part of the world to attract foreign direct investment.

Le livre de François Guillemot éclaire un aspect de la guerre du Viêt-Nam relativement peu souligné dans l’historiographie plus large du conflit : les expériences et les points de vue des femmes vietnamiennes durant la guerre. Son étude, divisée en deux sections, examine en premier lieu, au sein de contextes multiples, les vécus de ces femmes des deux côtés du 17e parallèle et de milieux très variés, avant de resserrer son attention dans un second temps sur l’histoire des « Jeunesses de Choc ou TNXP » pendant les guerres d’Indochine et du Viêt-Nam, et plus particulièrement sur la féminisation de ces troupes lors de cette dernière guerre.

Erik Harms wins 2014 Harry J. Benda Prize in recognition of his achievement as the author of Saigon's Edge - On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City.
“Saigon’s Edge” explores life in Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. The author puts forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts people living at the intersection of rural and urban worlds and opens a window on Vietnam’s larger turn toward market socialism and the celebration of urbanization.”

(VOV) – The Vietnamese film Nuoc 2030 (Water 2030) officially opened the 64th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) on February 6.
Nuoc 2030, based on Nguyen Ngoc Tu’s novella Nuoc Nhu Nuoc Mat (Water Looks Like Tears), was filmed in 2013 and completed in 2014. The thriller is set in a 2030 where half of southern Vietnam lies underwater, flooded by risen oceans. Those who refused to flee their homes harvest crops on floating farms.
Organisers have commended the film on its sophisticated combination of science fiction, mystery, and romance.

The sale of audiobooks has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2012, total industry sales in the book business fell just under 1 percent over all, but those of downloadable audiobooks rose by more than 20 percent. That year, 13,255 titles came out as audiobooks, compared with 4,602 in 2009. Publishers seem to be paying more attention to their production. When Simon and Schuster published Colm Toibin’s “Testament of Mary” last autumn, the narrator was Meryl Streep.

“My parents were very much against writing and even very much against me reading literature, which they thought put wrong thoughts in your head,” she recalled recently at her home in a leafy hillside neighborhood here. “I don’t think they liked me reading anything but science. But I enjoyed literature always, from the beginning.”

Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1976 film “Network” was, and remains, the kind of literate, darkly funny and breathtakingly prescient material that prompts many to claim it as the greatest screenplay of the 20th century. In “Mad as Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies,” Dave Itzkoff, a culture reporter for The New York Times, takes us behind the curtain and shows us why.

In 1969, shortly after being hired at U.S.C., Professor Bengtson began a study of 350 families, whom he interviewed regularly until 2008. In some families, he interviewed four generations. In all, his respondents were born in years spanning 1878 to 1989.
In “Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations” (Oxford; $29.95), written with two colleagues, Professor Bengtson argues that families do a pretty good job of passing religious faith to their children. Professor Bengtson has theories about why some children keep the faith while others leave.

NEW DELHI — In a fight with a major company, a frail 84-year-old retired headmaster would seem to be the David to India’s publishing Goliath, Penguin Books.
But this week the headmaster, Dinanath Batra, achieved the crowning victory of his career as a right-wing campaigner, forcing Penguin to withdraw and destroy remaining copies of a scholarly work on Hinduism by an American professor that Mr. Batra has called “malicious,” “dirty” and “perverse.”

The 16 oral histories in Corinne Goria's excellent anthology Invisible Hands is an attempt to change this by elucidating the realities behind the scenes of the so-called global economy. While each of the book's four chapters is preceded by a brief overview of working conditions in a particular occupation, individual accounts form the bulk of the text. And although these accounts are not wholly eye-opening - numerous labor journalists have covered worker mistreatment consistently in articles and books - when taken as a whole they illustrate the profound disrespect that greets far too much of the world's workforce. What's more, the stories in Invisible Hands paint a horrifying portrait of the impact of rampant consumerism on communities and individuals from Bangladesh to Zambia.