Bu itibaren Ranian, Pakistan
This is an interesting book... at first. Yunus details how his Nobel peace prize winning concept of micro-lending to alleviate poverty came about. It is very interesting to read how he was a respected Economics professor, and how he found the great theories of economics worked well in just that, theory, but in real life people right outside his classroom were starving to death. It is inspiring to read how the bank began, how he started studying the poorest of the poor and was astonished at how a lack of just $27 was keeping an entire village in poverty. It is amazing to read how he started the bank, how it succeeded and took off. Then, it becomes less interesting, inspiring, and amazing, as it just goes on, and on, and on... Imagine going to the website of a groundbreaking company, and clicking on the "About us" section, only to find that it is about 300 pages. Yeah, that's how this book felt.
Anyone who believes that television is the single most deteriorating factor of democratic society, should definitely read Putnam's Bowling Alone. He convincingly correlates a decline in civic participation and community organization with a growth in TV viewing. Very interesting.
Not sure what to say about Ortega y Gasset other than that he's a conspicuous elitist, without necessarily being aristocratic or absolutely class-conscious in his elitism; the mass-man is the self-satisfied man, the man who doesn't look beyond himself for meaning or challenge (shades of Lukacs' "transcendental homelessness") -- which is a state of affairs that comes about through the brute fact of plenitude: more people enjoying more goods as their rights (rather than as fruits of their own struggle). Not sure entirely if this will be useful to think about in terms of crowd-theory, but I guess it's nice to see the seething resentment of the crowd in Le Bon become an articulated hope for the coming war with the mass in Ortega y Gasset. (And doesn't that old-style aristo naming convention already makes Jose seem multiple?)
Reviewed here.