I Want to Dance and Other Poems
Tanure Ojaide



Winner of the 2003 Association of Nigerian Authors Prize for Poetry, by one of Nigeria's foremost contemporary poets. 'I Want to Dance' is an extended song cycle divided into three parts. In the song, the poetic voice undergoes a journey of experience from west to east and night to day; and reflects upon moving away from, and returning home. Tanure Ojaide is a leading voice amongst the new younger generation of Nigerian poets. He is author of several collections of poems including most recently, Daydream of Ants (Malthouse Press), and Delta Blues and Other Home Songs (Kraft Books). He has also written literary criticism on the poetry of Wole Soyinka and black poetic consciousness. He has won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region, and has been awarded the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize twice, and his work has been translated around the world.

ISBN: 0962886459
Publisher: African Heritage Press
Format: Paperback
Published: 2003 Extent: 90pp

Other African poetry titles (UK): http://www.africanbookscollective.com/acatalog/lit_index.html

Also from http://www.africanbookscollective.com/

Breathing Life into the African Union Protocol on Women's Rights in Africa
Edited by Roselynn Musa, Faiza Jama Mohammed & Firoze Manji
- also available in French: Vulgarisation du protocole de l'union africaine sur les droits des femmes en Afrique



The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights on Women's Rights is arguably one of Africa's most ground-breaking and progressive rights instruments for gender equality.

Arising from a conference of Solidarity for African Women's Rights, and the Women, Gender and Development Directorate of the African Union, the focus here is on ensuring meangingful interpreptation of the Protocol.

978-1-904855-66-8 $24.95/£14.95
Solidarity for African Women's Rights
Available now from orders@africanbookscollective.com

Love, Motherhood and the African Heritage.
The Legacy of Flora Nwapa
Femi Nzegwu



An in-depth historical analysis of the identity and role of the African woman: in relation to her husband, her family and society; and of the central importance of women to an inclusive and successful African renaissance. The author draws on the writings and wider work of Flora Nwapa, showing how she made an unprecedented contribution to African literature and thought; opened up a woman-centred front in African anti-colonial discourse; and laid foundations for African intellectual movements, such as the African Renaissance. She illustrates how Nwapa was pioneering in fighting Western intellectual imperialism in areas such as history, literature, anthropology and publishing; and in exposing how literary/academic postcolonial discourses have misrepresented gender with respect to Africa. She discusses Nwapa's literary fiction in some detail, including her Biafran war fiction, emphasising how Nwapa depicts the dual-gender complementarity amongst the Igbo of the pre-colonial period; and the roleof the mother as a cornerstone of Africa's family, communal and political life. She uses this analysis to propses that historical bridging from pre- to post-colonial times through the medium of women and the institution of motherhood might help to discard the ever-present shackles of colonialism, and pave the way for a more coherent and consistent African-centred philosophy and an African-led development process. The author is a gender-activist, and expert in cognitive applications of African gender systems to child development and public health.

ISBN: 1903625092 Publisher: African Renaissance
Format: Paperback
Published: 2001 [publ. 2003] Extent: 256pp

WILD SEED
by Octavia Butler


OK Firefly, you don't think you are going to escape my science fiction invasion do you?

This is my favorite book by Octavia Butler. I won't say it is her best because there is still a bunch of her stuff that I haven't read. This link has some of the first chapter. The cover is the one on my book but there is another that isn't nearly as cool.

http://www.hachettebookgroupusa.com/books/89/0446606723...pter_excerpt312.html

Butler is not a hard science fiction writer, her stories are more psychological rather than about physics and technology. This is a story about a man and woman with unusual natural powers. It might be regarded as fantasy rather than SF.

http://www.pasadena.edu/about/history/alumni/butler/butler.cfm

umbra

Cool by me. They say "never judge a book by it's cover", but this looks pretty interesting.

My own foray into sci-fi is limited to the films (that I like) Total Recall & Existenz - and the Matrix at a stretch. My fave was the ancient Martian Chronicles (vintage... Rock Hudson)
What's that I hear? Deafening laughter?
Guess it's time to update.

Some oldies are too good to be missed.

Forbidden Planet (1956)



Star Wars can't touch it after all these years.

The Abyss (1989)



http://www.thedigitalbits.com/reviews/abyssse.html

http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/abyss.html

Definitely one of the all time great SF flicks but be sure to see the "Special Edition" The theater version fell flat at the end. It was edited to reduce the time and messed it up bad.

Don't you have The Matrix DVDs and haven't you watched them at least 10 times? Wattsa madda you?

http://africanamerica.org/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/34970854/m...551010393#8551010393

um

Beware of Vulcans from the Dark Side

This message has been edited. Last edited by: umbrarchist,

quote:

Originally posted by umbrarchist:
Don't you have The Matrix DVDs and haven't you watched them at least 10 times? Wattsa madda you?

well I can see I'll have to fly over and watch the trilogy at your place.

I liked the first half of the first Matrix, then it turned into an agressive MTV video clip.
And that kinda put me off. I'm not saying the story and book (and subsequent copyright court action not withstanding) isn't a great concept or read, I just haven't pursued it. I know I am the only person on the planet who was not in awe of either The Matrix, or that other film Moulin Rouge. But I'm not saying The Matrix was anywhere near as annoying at Moulin Rouge - Aussie director or not - that film almost made me wanna.... and that Aussie icon Baz Lurman.

Can't remember if I've seen Forbidden Planet or not - dig the robot. Hmmm....might be time to revisit, crack open the organic popcorn I bought last week. I loved the Twilight Zone and its psycho intro music. Yeh!

I'm starting to think I have icon-dislexia.

however...

fully restored

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FireFly,

Sacred Woman, Sacred Dance: Awakening Spirituality Through Movement and Ritual
by Iris J. Stewart



Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Inner Traditions (August 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN: 0892816058

Reviews

Isadora Duncan : "If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and will always be the same."
Circle Magazine, Winter 2000/2001 : "This is a marvelous and unique exploration of women's spirituality through a study of dance. It is beautifully illustrated with inspirational photos of sacred dancers. This is an excellent addition to the study of the many forms and expressions of Women's Spirituality."

Katie Watts, Argus-Courier Online : "Her bibliography and notes are extensive. She doesn't leave hanging the reader who wants to learn more about or participate in sacred dance, but offers several pages of resources. The book is not only a history of women and dance, but a textbook for performing sacred dances."

Today's Books, August 2000 : "Exceptional."
Catholic Women's NETWORK, January/February 2001 : "This book is the first to explore women's spiritual expression in the study of dance. In reclaiming our connection to sacred dance, we regain a valuable spiritual expression. A wonderful book!"
Frances Fawkes, The Grapevine Magazine : "Although a wealth of research is behind the text it is conveyed in a very digestible form. Myths, history, symbolism together with ancient and modern forms of dance from all cultures are drawn together to uncover the meaning behind the dance."

Anne Apynys., Ph.D., Habibi, A Journal for Lovers of Middle Eastern Dance & Arts, Vol. 18, No. 3, 2000 : "Stewart has provided a multitude of lovely pictures and illustrations to underscore her discovery of the existence of earlier sacred dance and her aspiration to encourage its growth. Although all of what she describes is available elsewhere, she has performed a valuable service by bringing it together under a single cover."

Dance Magazine, March 2001, Vol. 75, No. 3 : "Richly illustrated with graphics and photographs from around the world (some taken at the sites by the author), this book is a record of Iris Stewart's search for evidence of the sacred-logically, historically and experientially."

Mary K. Greer, Tarot Newletter, Summer 2001 : "I don't know of another book like this one--don't miss it."

The Midwest Book Review, May 2002 : ". . . includes extensive source notes, bibliography and other resources, such that it could be considered a bible of sacred dance!"

Elizabeth Barrette, SageWoman, Summer 2002 : "Dancers will find it of special interest, but it's delightful for everyone else as well. Highly recommended."

hmmm... tempting yoga and bellydancing in one!



Tribal Fusion - Yoga Isolations & Drills for Bellydance DVD (2005)
DVD Release Date: March 8, 2005


Amazon.com

The connection and interdependence between yoga and belly dance are explored in Tribal Fusion, a reasonably comprehensive and intense program drawing on both disciplines and demonstrated by the remarkable Rachel Brice. Practices of three different lengths (15, 30, and about 40 minutes) are offered; elements in the shorter practices are repeated and expanded on in the longer ones. The yoga portions include some basic sun salutations, lunges, backbends (specifically the locust pose), and such; the more extensive belly dancing exercises and undulations focus on the hips, the chest, and shoulders. Brice's instructions are efficient, if sometimes a bit on the brisk side (it's one thing to exhort students to practice ujjayi pranayama, the deep, audible nostril breathing style used in yoga; it's quite another to do so without even saying what it is, let alone showing how it's done). Whether or not any of the female users for which this DVD is intended will be able to replicate Brice's belly dancing moves is open to question, as her technique and amazingly toned body make things look easy when, in fact, mere mortals may find them baffling, to say the least. Moreover, although Carolena Nericcio, one of Brice's mentors and the "hostess" of this program, stresses that "the main attraction (of belly dancing) is delight," Brice doesn't seem to be having much fun, never so much as cracking a smile. Little matter. When you're this good, there's no need to kid around. --Sam Graham

Product Description:

Bellydance Superstar Rachel Brice teaches basic tools that can be incorporated into daily practice that will bring flexibility, strength and, if practiced regularly, effortlessness into whatever Belly Dance style you choose. Instruction includes a short Yoga practice to warm up and strengthen the body as well as a final chapter on Yoga for flexibility."

What happened to my post? How did I get two Robbie pix?

um

um... it's along story.
Blame it on my icon-dyslexia and a bit of hasty re-editing.

There has been another modification to my post. I had a comment about Forbidden Planet being 50 years old and being very pessimistic about when the moon landing would occur.

um

quote:

Originally posted by umbrarchist:
There has been another modification to my post. I had a comment about Forbidden Planet being 50 years old and being very pessimistic about when the moon landing would occur.

um

mea culpa, but this is all I had in my Inbox to work with... perhaps your comment was added later?

umbrarchist
Posted November 27, 2006 08:06 PM
Some oldies are too good to be missed.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

[pic]

Star Wars can't touch it after all these years.

The Abyss (1989)

[pic]

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/reviews/abyssse.html

http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/abyss.html

Definitely one of the all time great SF flicks but be sure to see the "Special Edition" The theater version fell flat at the end. It was edited to reduce the time and messed it up bad.

Don't you have The Matrix DVDs and haven't you watched them at least 10 times? Wattsa madda you?

http://africanamerica.org/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/34970854/m...551010393#8551010393

um
Beware of Vulcans from the Dark Side


take it... or leave it.

This book is probably old news in the USA but this is a new title over here.
I'd be very interested in any feedback/personal opinions on the list of contributors - I couldn't find an online review. Flicking through an instore copy, it is interesting, if weighty reading.


After the Storm: Leading African American Scholars Use Post-Hurricane Louisiana as a Window into Twenty-first-century Black (Hardcover)
by David Troutt (Editor)
ISBN: 1595581162




The book has an Introduction by Derrick Bell, and an essay by each of the following intellectuals:
Sheryll Cashin
Adolph L. Reed Jr
Cheryl I. Harris & Devon W. Carbado
Kathryn Russell-Brown
Adrien Katherne Wing
John Valery White
Clement Alexander Price
Anthony Paul Farley
.

here's one for um...
This book was referenced in 'Politics of Land Reform', it's by Peruvian economist Hernanado de Soto although a 2000 title.



Here's Chapter 1, kindly provided by the New York Times

The Mystery of Capital
Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
By HERNANDO DE SOTO
Basic Books

Chapter 1

The Five Mysteries
of Capital

The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society? ... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?
—Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce



The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall ended more than a century of political competition between capitalism and communism. Capitalism stands alone as the only feasible way to rationally organize a modern economy. At this moment in history, no responsible nation has a choice. As a result, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Third World and former communist nations have balanced their budgets, cut subsidies, welcomed foreign investment, and dropped their tariff barriers.

Their efforts have been repaid with bitter disappointment. From Russia to Venezuela, the past half-decade has been a time of economic suffering, tumbling incomes, anxiety, and resentment; of "starving, rioting, and looting," in the stinging words of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. In a recent editorial the New York Times said, "For much of the world, the marketplace extolled by the West in the afterglow of victory in the Cold War has been supplanted by the cruelty of markets, wariness toward capitalism, and dangers of instability." The triumph of capitalism only in the West could be a recipe for economic and political disaster.

For Americans enjoying both peace and prosperity, it has been all too easy to ignore the turmoil elsewhere. How can capitalism be in trouble when the Dow Jones Industrial average is climbing higher than Sir Edmund Hillary? Americans look at other nations and see progress, even if it is slow and uneven. Can't you eat a Big Mac in Moscow, rent a video from Blockbuster in Shanghai, and reach the Internet in Caracas?

Even in the United States, however, the foreboding cannot be completely stifled. Americans see Colombia poised on the brink of a major civil war between drug-trafficking guerrillas and repressive militias, an intractable insurgency in the south of Mexico, and an important part of Asia's force-fed economic growth draining away into corruption and chaos. In Latin America, sympathy for free markets is dwindling: Support for privatization has dropped from 46 percent of the population to 36 percent in May 2000. Most ominously of all, in the former communist nations capitalism has been found wanting, and men associated with old regimes stand poised to resume power. Some Americans sense too that one reason for their decade-long boom is that the more precarious the rest of the world looks, the more attractive American stocks and bonds become as a haven for international money.

In the business community of the West, there is a growing concern that the failure of most of the rest of the world to implement capitalism will eventually drive the rich economies into recession. As millions of investors have painfully learned from the evaporation of their emerging market funds, globalization is a two-way street: If the Third World and former communist nations cannot escape the influence of the West, neither can the West disentangle itself from them. Adverse reactions to capitalism have also been growing stronger within rich countries themselves. The rioting in Seattle at the meeting of the World Trade Organization in December 1999 and a few months later at the IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C., regardless of the diversity of the grievances, highlighted the anger that spreading capitalism inspires. Many have begun recalling the economic historian Karl Polanyi's warnings that free markets can collide with society and lead to fascism. Japan is struggling through its most prolonged slump since the Great Depression. Western Europeans vote for politicians who promise them a "third way" that rejects what a French best-seller has labeled L'Horreur économique.

These whispers of alarm, disturbing though they are, have thus far only prompted American and European leaders to repeat to the rest of the world the same wearisome lectures: Stabilize your currencies, hang tough, ignore the food riots, and wait patiently for the foreign investors to return.

Foreign investment is, of course, a very good thing. The more of it, the better. Stable currencies are good, too, as are free trade and transparent banking practices and the privatization of state-owned industries and every other remedy in the Western pharmacopoeia. Yet we continually forget that global capitalism has been tried before. In Latin America, for example, reforms directed at creating capitalist systems have been tried at least four times since independence from Spain in the 1820s. Each time, after the initial euphoria, Latin Americans swung back from capitalist and market economy policies. These remedies are clearly not enough. Indeed, they fall so far short as to be almost irrelevant.

When these remedies fail, Westerners all too often respond not by questioning the adequacy of the remedies but by blaming Third World peoples for their lack of entrepreneurial spirit or market orientation. If they have failed to prosper despite all the excellent advice, it is because something is the matter with them: They missed the Protestant Reformation, or they are crippled by the disabling legacy of colonial Europe, or their IQs are too low. But the suggestion that it is culture that explains the success of such diverse places as Japan, Switzerland, and California, and culture again that explains the relative poverty of such equally diverse places as China, Estonia, and Baja California, is worse than inhumane; it is unconvincing. The disparity of wealth between the West and the rest of the world is far too great to be explained by culture alone. Most people want the fruits of capital—so much so that many, from the children of Sanchez to Khrushchev's son, are flocking to Western nations.

The cities of the Third World and the former communist countries are teeming with entrepreneurs. You cannot walk through a Middle Eastern market, hike up to a Latin American village, or climb into a taxicab in Moscow without someone trying to make a deal with you. The inhabitants of these countries possess talent, enthusiasm, and an astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing. They can grasp and use modern technology. Otherwise, American businesses would not be struggling to control the unauthorized use of their patents abroad, nor would the U.S. government be striving so desperately to keep modern weapons technology out of the hands of Third World countries. Markets are an ancient and universal tradition: Christ drove the merchants out of the temple two thousand years ago, and Mexicans were taking their products to market long before Columbus reached America.

But if people in countries making the transition to capitalism are not pitiful beggars, are not helplessly trapped in obsolete ways, and are not the uncritical prisoners of dysfunctional cultures, what is it that prevents capitalism from delivering to them the same wealth it has delivered to the West? Why does capitalism thrive only in the West, as if enclosed in a bell jar?

In this book I intend to demonstrate that the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their people engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy.

I will also show, with the help of facts and figures that my research team and I have collected, block by block and farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, that most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of savings among the poor is, in fact, immense—forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. In Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America, the total assets of the poor are more than one hundred fifty times greater than all the foreign investment received since Haiti's independence from France in 1804. If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget to the level recommended by the United Nations—0.7 percent of national income—it would take the richest country on earth more than 150 years to transfer to the world's poor resources equal to those they already possess.

But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment.

In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and makes them generate capital.

Third World and former communist nations do not have this representational process. As a result, most of them are undercapitalized, in the same way that a firm is undercapitalized when it issues fewer securities than its income and assets would justify. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investment and finance. Without representations, their assets are dead capital.

The poor inhabitants of these nations—five-sixths of humanity—do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work.

This is the mystery of capital. Solving it requires an understanding of why Westerners, by representing assets with titles, are able to see and draw out capital from them. One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend and to gain access to those things we know exist but cannot see. Not everything that is real and useful is tangible and visible. Time, for example, is real, but it can only be efficiently managed when it is represented by a clock or a calendar. Throughout history, human beings have invented representational systems—writing, musical notation, double-entry bookkeeping—to grasp with the mind what human hands could never touch. In the same way, the great practitioners of capitalism, from the creators of integrated title systems and corporate stock to Michael Milken, were able to reveal and extract capital where others saw only junk by devising new ways to represent the invisible potential that is locked up in the assets we accumulate.

At this very moment you are surrounded by waves of Ukrainian, Chinese, and Brazilian television that you cannot see. So, too, are you surrounded by assets that invisibly harbor capital. Just as the waves of Ukrainian television are far too weak for you to sense them directly but can, with the help of a television set, be decoded to be seen and heard, so can capital be extracted and processed from assets. But only the West has the conversion process required to transform the invisible to the visible. It is this disparity that explains why Western nations can create capital and the Third World and former communist nations cannot.

The absence of this process in the poorer regions of the world—where two-thirds of humanity lives—is not the consequence of some Western monopolistic conspiracy. It is rather that Westerners take this mechanism so completely for granted that they have lost all awareness of its existence. Although it is huge, nobody sees it, including the Americans, Europeans, and Japanese who owe all their wealth to their ability to use it. It is an implicit legal infrastructure hidden deep within their property systems—of which ownership is but the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is an intricate man-made process that can transform assets and labor into capital. This process was not created from a blueprint and is not described in a glossy brochure. Its origins are obscure and its significance buried in the economic subconscious of Western capitalist nations.

How could something so important have slipped our minds? It is not uncommon for us to know how to use things without understanding why they work. Sailors used magnetic compasses long before there was a satisfactory theory of magnetism. Animal breeders had a working knowledge of genetics long before Gregor Mendel explained genetic principles. Even as the West prospers from abundant capital, do people really understand the origin of capital? If they don't, there always remains the possibility that the West might damage the source of its own strength. Being clear about the source of capital will also prepare the West to protect itself and the rest of the world as soon as the prosperity of the moment yields to the crisis that is sure to come. Then the question that always arises in international crises will be heard again: Whose money will be used to solve the problem?

So far, Western countries have been happy to take their system for producing capital entirely for granted and to leave its history undocumented. That history must be recovered. This book is an effort to reopen the exploration of the source of capital and thus explain how to correct the economic failures of poor countries. These failures have nothing to do with deficiencies in cultural or genetic heritage. Would anyone suggest "cultural" commonalities between Latin Americans and Russians? Yet in the last decade, ever since both regions began to build capitalism without capital, they have shared the same political, social, and economic problems: glaring inequality, underground economies, pervasive mafias, political instability, capital flight, flagrant disregard for the law. These troubles did not originate in the monasteries of the Orthodox Church or along the pathways of the Incas.

But it is not only former communist and Third World countries that have suffered all of these problems. The same was true of the United States in 1783, when President George Washington complained about "banditti ... skimming and disposing of the cream of the country at the expense of the many." These "banditti" were squatters and small illegal entrepreneurs occupying lands they did not own. For the next one hundred years, such squatters battled for legal rights to their land and miners warred over their claims because ownership laws differed from town to town and camp to camp. Enforcing property rights created such a quagmire of social unrest and antagonism throughout the young United States that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Joseph Story, wondered in 1820 whether lawyers would ever be able to settle them.

Do squatters, bandits, and flagrant disregard of the law sound familiar? Americans and Europeans have been telling the other countries of the world, "You have to be more like us." In fact, they are very much like the United States of a century ago when it too was an undeveloped country. Western politicians once faced the same dramatic challenges that leaders of the developing and former communist countries are facing today. But their successors have lost contact with the days when the pioneers who opened the American West were undercapitalized because they seldom possessed title to the lands they settled and the goods they owned, when Adam Smith did his shopping in black markets and English street urchins plucked pennies cast by laughing tourists into the mud banks of the Thames, when Jean-Baptiste Colbert's technocrats executed 16,000 small entrepreneurs whose only crime was manufacturing and importing cotton cloth in violation of France's industrial codes.

That past is many nations' present. The Western nations have so successfully integrated their poor into their economies that they have lost even the memory of how it was done, how the creation of capital began back when, as the American historian Gordon Wood has written, "something momentous was happening in the society and culture that released the aspirations and energies of common people as never before in American history." The "something momentous" was that Americans and Europeans were on the verge of establishing widespread formal property law and inventing the conversion process in that law that allowed them to create capital. This was the moment when the West crossed the demarcation line that led to successful capitalism—when it ceased being a private club and became a popular culture, when George Washington's dreaded "banditti" were transformed into the beloved pioneers that American culture now venerates.



* * *



The paradox is as clear as it is unsettling: Capital, the most essential component of Western economic advance, is the one that has received the least attention. Neglect has shrouded it in mystery—in fact, in a series of five mysteries.



The Mystery of the Missing Information

Charitable organizations have so emphasized the miseries and helplessness of the world's poor that no one has properly documented their capacity for accumulating assets. Over the past five years, I and a hundred colleagues from six different nations have closed our books and opened our eyes—and gone out into the streets and countrysides of four continents to count how much the poorest sectors of society have saved. The quantity is enormous. But most of it is dead capital.



The Mystery of Capital

This is the key mystery and the centerpiece of this book. Capital is a subject that has fascinated thinkers for the past three centuries. Marx said that you needed to go beyond physics to touch "the hen that lays the golden eggs"; Adam Smith felt you had to create "a sort of waggon-way through the air" to reach that same hen. But no one has told us where the hen hides. What is capital, how is it produced, and how is it related to money?



The Mystery of Political Awareness

If there is so much dead capital in the world, and in the hands of so many poor people, why haven't governments tried to tap into this potential wealth? Simply because the evidence they needed has only become available in the past forty years as billions of people throughout the world have moved from life organized on a small scale to life on a large scale. This migration to the cities has rapidly divided labor and spawned in poorer countries a huge industrial-commercial revolution—one that, incredibly, has been virtually ignored.



The Missing Lessons of U.S. History

What is going on in the Third World and the former communist countries has happened before, in Europe and North America. Unfortunately, we have been so mesmerized by the failure of so many nations to make the transition to capitalism that we have forgotten how the successful capitalist nations actually did it. For years I visited technocrats and politicians in advanced nations, from Alaska to Tokyo, but they had no answers. It was a mystery. I finally found the answer in their