Let Me Stand Alone: the Journals of Rachel Corrie
By: Rachel Corrie & the Corrie Family
On March 16, 2003, a 23-year-old American woman placed herself between the home of a Palestinian family and an advancing armoured bulldozer driven by a member of the Israel Defense Forces. The young woman's name was Rachel Corrie, and she was there in non-violent protest against the Israeli Army's demolition of Palestinian homes on the Gaza Strip. The bulldozer did not stop its advance towards her and Rachel was killed.
Let Me Stand Alone: the Journals of Rachel Corrie is Rachel's story in her own words, through a compilation of her journal entries, essays, sketches, letters and emails to friends and family. The book was put together by her family with an introduction by her father. Through her writings, Rachel reveals herself to be an intelligent young woman, gifted in writing and drawing, possessing a growing sense of social conscience and desire to help
those less fortunate than herself.
Rachel was greatly impacted by the events of September 11, 2001, which brought the effects of American foreign policy to the forefront of her awareness. After that, her sense of social responsibility grew stronger than ever and she became determined to find a way to make a positive impact in the world.
In January 2003, Rachel travelled to Israel with the International Solidarity Movement, an activist group focusing on non-violent protest against the Israeli military's actions against Palestinian civilians. In the last month of her life, the young woman frequently used herself as a human shield to protect Palestinian homes and families and also made efforts to
repair local water wells damaged by Israeli bulldozers. Though she was scared to leave the safety of America for the war-torn Gaza Strip, Rachel was committed to aiding peace efforts in that region.
Let Me Stand Alone: the Journals of Rachel Corrie is the true-story of a brave and compassionate young woman, willing to risk everything, even her own life, for what she believed in. Readers who enjoy non-fiction accounts of ordinary people doing extraordinary things will appreciate this book. It can be found in the adult non-fiction area of the Prince George Public Library.
- Reviewed by Teresa Taggart, readers' advisor at the Prince George Public
Library
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture
By Andrew Keen
This is a book about betrayal.
For the geniuses behind the amazing technological developments that have emerged from Silicon Valley, Andrew Keen's book is a shot below the belt. For Keen, a technological innovator himself, the work of his contemporaries has produced Frankenstein's monster - a dumb but powerful beast capable of much destruction.
The wonders of the web have been touted as bringing democracy and knowledge to everyone equally by providing access to both information and the means to promote your views through blogs and videos. It's all a sham, Keen argues.
It's not democracy on the Internet, it's anarchy. The potential for knowledge is there, but how one find it when the views of an uninformed, uneducated computer geek locked away in his parent's basement are equal to those of a tenured professor?
Rather than accessing a database and reading the academic work on climate change or evolution or vaccinations, people can type those words into Google and get anyone's conspiracy theories about how global warming isn't real, evolution is "just a theory", and vaccinations cause autism and are a money grab by multinational pharmaceuticals. In the wild west of the World Wide Web, experts and entire disciplines of modern science are dismissed because it is easy to locate websites, blogs and videos to confirm anyone's chosen ignorance.
That ignorance is spreading like a virus. An entire generation has learned that plagiarism and intellectual property are nothing but mere words representing concepts horribly out of date. Theft costing the economy billions of dollars happens online each day, whether a person is downloading the latest Hollywood blockbuster or accessing someone's bank account. Just because it's easy to download pirated music or movies doesn't mean it's not
stealing. Meanwhile, easy access to pornography and gambling continues to cause dire, real-world damage to millions each day while further tearing away the morality embedded into our culture.
The costs of today's Internet are easy to ignore because the glare of the monitor blinds us all to the damage. We're already paying the price and the bill continues to climb.
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen is available in the non-fiction section of the Prince George Public Library
-- reviewed by Neil Godbout, administrative communications co-ordinator at
the Prince George Public Library.
