Best-organised hope
In The Parliament of Man the distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy gives a thorough and timely history of the United Nations that explains the institution’s roots and functions and also focuses an objective eye on the UN’s effectiveness as a body and on its prospects for success in meeting the challenges. The book was translated by Raouf Abbas and was issued by the National Centre for Translation.
With all its flaws and failures, Kennedy argues that the UN still represents man’s best-organised hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield. He drafts official reports for the UN’s fiftieth anniversary on how to improve the organisation’s performance, he makes sense of the many commissions and committees, and how its six main operating sections–General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (UNESCO), Trusteeship Council, Secretariat, and International Court–operate and interact. Citing examples from the UN’s history, he shows how the five permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France—on numerous occasions overcame political antagonism to spearhead military supervision of aid in humanitarian crises, and how lack of cooperation among the great powers restricted such initiatives as the control of greenhouse gas emissions and worsened the harmful effects of globalisation on developing nations’ economies.
In this book, Kennedy ably proves that it is difficult to imagine how harmful it would have been for our six billion people world had there been no UN.
Arab film
Al-Cinema wa Qadaya al-Mugtama al-Arabi (Cinema and the Issues of Arab Society) is a study in which Mohamed Mounir Hegab discusses the negative changes in Arab cinema during the last two decades in both form and content. Mounir cites the so many problems which caused the retardation of Egyptian cinema, and suggests solutions to these problems. The book was issued by al-Fagr (Dawn) Publishing House.
Tears of the cheetah
The history of life on Earth is dominated by extinction events so numerous that over 99.9 per cent of the species ever to have existed are gone forever. If animals could talk, we would ask them to recall their own ancestries, in particular the secrets as to how they avoided almost inevitable annihilation in the face of daily assaults by predators, climactic cataclysms, deadly infections and innate diseases.
The National Centre for Translation has issued the book Tears of the Cheetah by Stephen O’Brien, translated into Arabic by Ibrahim Fahmy. O’Brien deals with some scientific facts through adventures he passed by together with his team. He had rare experience in different regions all over the world, travelling through wild jungles, deep oceans, and on the summits of the highest mountains. He made experiments on several kinds of animals such as rats, cheetahs, lions and monkeys; in these experiments he focused on the theories of heredity and immunity.
In Tears of the Cheetah, O##Brien narrates fast-moving science adventure stories that explore the mysteries of survival among the earth’s most endangered wildlife. He uncovers the secret histories of exotic species such as Indonesian orangutans, humpback whales, and the imperiled cheetah—the world’s fastest animal which nonetheless cannot escape its own genetic weaknesses.
Tears of the Cheetah offers a fascinating glimpse of the insight gained when geneticists venture into the wild.
Aunt Tula
In his new novel La Tia Tula or Aunt Tula, the Spanish writer Miguel De Unamuno excells in painting a memorable portrait of the indomitable Aunt Tula, who fulfills her maternal desires on her own terms. The novel is translated by Salah Almany and published by al-Mada House.
An attempt to comprehend
Muragaat min al-Jamaa al-Islamiya ilal-Jihad (Revisions from the Jamaa Islamia to Jihad) is the fruit of hard work and intensive research by a group of distinguished researchers in the field of the Islamic movements and their history. The book, which was compiled by Diaa’ Rashwan, is an attempt to offer readers an understanding of the reference points of Islamic movements, especially the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jihad Group, since both represent a significant link in the history of Islamic political radical movements.