Toluu

Readers Without Borders

Cyberspace safety and transformation of Internet crimeApril 17 2008

Human brain developed for hundreds of thousands of centuries sustaining the sense of risk that advice ed us to stay alive running from predators and hiding from risks. On one side, this million-year experience makes our sense of risk a pretty perfect one, since it assistance ed us to survive during hundreds of thousands of centuries of mutation, but then again, the term risk sounds a little bit exaggerated especially when quoted by Internet safety specialist s of today.

The latest news from Great Britain’s major retail bankers says, that if your online banking account has been wiped out and you didn’t use any Internet computer security software equipped with antivirus and antispyware as an example rent a car bulgariaкомпютри втора употребаNorton 360, you solely bear the responsibility for the losing of money and they won’t compensate you a penny. Banks even embedded a clause in the newly updated Banking Code, that says they are not responsible for any losing of money whether your PC doesn’t have antispyware software with the updated self-replicating malware definition installed. Sounds marvelous, doesn’t it?

According to recent Internet computer safety and online identity fraud research, the British Police are being informed about a new crime on the Internet event every 10 seconds.

On hiatus…January 9 2008

Due to lack of activity from members (including myself!) and other projects currently taking priority, I am temporarily suspending this website. I will leave it here, in case people want to read previous reviews.

Take care, and Happy Reading!

Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago by Alex KotlowiczOctober 18 2007

158 pages

Said better than I could, by a resident Chicagoan on amazon.com:

“Alex Kotlowicz mostly succeeds with this slice-of-life look at Chicago’s grittier side. He begins by interviewing Ed Sadlowski, former steelworker and union official living on the southeast side where most of the mills have shuttered. Equally interesting was the view from Edna’s restaurant in the west side ghetto where there are few businesses other than liquor stores. We also hear from an artist that paints murals for residents in public housing, a neighborhood of recent immigrants from many lands, a gadfly that fights corruption in the border suburb of Cicero (former headquarters of Al Capone), and several others. In many ways the author captures the city’s feel, and allows readers to see how Chicago has evolved into a mostly post-industrial city, yet one where poverty and fear of minorities and violence remain touchstones for some.

Oddly the author, who moved here 20 years ago from New York City, alternates praise with suggestions that the most successful see Chicago as unlovely and leave. In reality, most stay put in middle-class neighborhoods (or suburbs), acknowledging the city’s problems, but prideful of our vibrant economy, superb lakefront, museums, parks, skyline, and universities - Chicago leads the USA in Nobel Prize winners. Despite small flaws, this is a

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs TonightOctober 16 2007

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller
2001
301 pages

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of her African childhood.  It is both a brutally frank and loving reflection on a harsh upbringing in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.  Fuller’s parents are farmers, descended from a family of white Englishmen who have been in Africa for three generations.  They are African, but still stuck in a white colonial mindset.  Unashamedly racist, they are in search of a place where that colonial mindset still prevails, and a remote farm on which they can make a living.  This explains their continuous moves through Africa, as formerly white ruled colonies gain independence, and finally majority rule.

This is a hard book to review.  Despite the author’s casual references to bouts of malaria, living with bugs and rats, drinking beer and being drunk with her family at an early age, getting dreadfully sick from river water, and many other difficult circumstances, it is hard not to be appalled at the conditions she endured.  However, since the author is not feeling sorry for hersel

Volunatry Hostages of the SS by Drago ArsenijevicSeptember 21 2007

I cannot find you a photograph of this book’s cover from the Internet; It appears that I have stumbled upon a rare book.

However, in the effort to review what I have read, I will offer up this brief description. The book caught my eye because I had recently been witness to someone claiming that Swiss people aided the Nazi cause. My fiancГ© is Swiss, and he did not take this criticism lightly. The stories of the Swiss bankers who have kept millions of dollars worth of Jewish gold is a national shame, but one that rests squarely with a small group of elite men in Zurich.

Just two days later, with this conversation still fresh in my mind, I went into a local second-hand bookstore, and this was the very first book I laid eyes on.

The book follows the course of the foundings of the Red Cross, by the Genevan born Henri Dunant. The “Voluntary Hostages” refers to the handful of men who were brave enough to volunteer to enter a Nazi concentration camp, without knowing when they would again leave. The Red Cross, during WWII, did not come out and openly criticize the Nazi regime. In the book, the author says that this was a difficult decision for all involved, but ultimately the directors of the Red Cross felt that if they openly criticized the Nazis, they would be refused access to the camps, and to giving aid. As it were, access to the inside of the camps was nearly impossible, but the Red Cross did have a program set up which took shipments of food (do