Book Review, Lia's Purpura's Rough Likeness, JMWW Summer 2012

Book Review: Rough Likeness By Lia Purpura
Originally appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of JMWW.
Source: http://jmww.150m.com/PurpuraRev.html

Rough Likeness 
by Lia Purpura
Sarabande Books, 2011
978-1936747030, 224 pp., $15.95 paperback 

Rough Likeness, Lia Purpura's latest book, is an eclectic collection of essays and an attempt at explaining the mundane, the ordinary, and the things that do not usually populate dinner table conversations but are nevertheless part of the everyday imagination and life. Take the first essay, for instance, on buzzards: Why do we ignore the buzzard, she asks? A bird that does the job nobody else is prepared to do. I haven't killed a thing, the buzzard implores. Why see me as malevolent? "That no one wants my job that I go on being needed." In the essay titled "Against Gunmetal," Purpura laments about why some choose to describe shades of gray as gunmetal or as battleship gray. "Strike me down if I use it again. If I don't, right now, erase this method by which we impart, those of us who know nothing about guns, drama to a sky, pressure to a scene, hardness, knowhow, coldness to a description, glad for its hint of treachery, its sidelong, thanatotic meanness." Laziness in language and expression is something the author abhors, and is a theme that surfaces in other essays as well.

Purpura's prose is at once rich, lyrical, sudden, and provocative. Through her writing, she invites the reader to do what she does—provide everything you do, see, touch, or feel with the uniqueness of observation and attention that it deserves: "Here is a field between parking lots—real grass and dirt with bottles thrown in, amber longnecks, flat clears of hard stuff."

In the essay titled "Jump," Purpura ponders over the intentions behind a signpost that reads "Last Death from Jumping or Diving from Bridge June 15, 1995."

"Around the sign, around the inconclusive or—because of the or, the pause it stirs, the space it opens—fragments and conjectures gather: the last person was drunk"

Her reflective essays then are an essay (pun intended) into the layers folded under and between the everyday occurrences, the random signposts, the street signs, the buzzards flying overhead or the words attributed to colors (why gunmetal for gray?).

Rough Likeness can be savored whole or in bits, read from beginning to end or from the middle backwards. Purpura's writing is such that even without context, the prose is beautiful, to be enjoyed much like a Dali painting, different vantage points allowing for varied appreciation of the artwork.

That the author is also a poet is evident in the lyricisms and incantations in the writing, as when she describes a street as "that echt yellow stripe, those newly dribbled tar snakes filming cracks, curbs darkened with rain, fickle puddles, passing cars launching watery stars out of low spots to firmanents elsewhere."

The brilliance of Purpura's writing is such that even though her subjects in the essays may be ordinary (in the most fundamental sense of the word), in the rendering of the mundane as sublime and as that demanding acute and singular observation, she demands, nay commands the reader's absolute attention.—Girija Sankar

Poor Economics, Book Review, Hunger and Under Nutrition Blog, May 2012

First appeared in the Hunger and Under Nutrition Blog 

Source: http://www.hunger-undernutrition.org/blog/2012/05/book-review-poverty-economics.html
Poverty Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to fight Global Poverty - Abhijit Bannerjee & Esther Duflo,    Public Affairs. 2011.

There has been much debate recently on the efficacy of foreign aid and  whether international NGOs and developed countries ought to invest their tax dollars and grant funds in resource-poor countries.  These are very controversial issues and much that has been written both in academic and popular publications.

This book is not about any of them.

Poverty Economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo looks at the question of micro-approaches to poverty eradication, i.e. small scale interventions through local policy making or small but significant technological changes.  It avoids grand generalizations about “poor people” and tries to explain their challenges in context.  It also points out how in many cases, the basic choices that the poor have to make are already made for the rich.

The authors are both professors, economists and the co-founders of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT.  Through a number of field studies and using their favorite research method- Randomized Controlled Trials - the authors demonstrate that it is possible to have a significant and meaningful impact on the lives of the poor through context specific micro-changes. The book provides numeous examples from the fields of healthcare, education,micro-lending/saving, economic development and nutrition security, all in the context of the lives of people who make less than $1  per day.

The first part of the book focuses on the private lives of the poor and their approach to healthcare, education, and savings.  The second part discusses the efforts of institutions - large and small - in impacting the poor in meaningful ways.  Banerjee and Duflo also demonstrate how many big interventions fail because they often ignore or neglect local aspirations, cultures and contexts.   The real value of this book is that in case after case, the authors provide tools and techniques for understanding the performance of various interventions that have been implemented. Mainly, they rely on creative problem solving in the local context and the use of rigorous statistical methods to evaluate how indicators such as school attendance or healthcare availability have improved as a result of a new approach to problem solving.

In short, this book is a must-read for development practitioners working in the field of poverty alleviation and seeking new ways of approaching program and policy impact.

http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Poverty/dp/1586487981

http://globalhealthaction.org