Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Im enjoying a little downtime after the crazy 2015,2014,2013,2012 processes and wanted to share some books out by some of my friends which you may enjoy for summer reading. I reviewed Nixon's Comrades: A Kremlin Note Taker Remembers  earlier in the year a great book by Andrey Vavilov who was the Russian governments Deputy Ambassador to UNEP and Habitat as well as an 'enb'er. In the book Andrey looks back on his unique experience at the side of Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon, Cold War rivals who became architects of détente. He offers a private tour of super power summit conferences of the 1970s, where he took notes and interpreted for Soviet leaders in their secret discussions with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and later with Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. “Nixon’s Comrades” draws mainly on the author’s notes, recollections and private sources. It is a personal view of the gravitational attraction of Nixon’s Imperial Presidency and Brezhnev’s One-Party State. ...

I have just finished one of the best books I have read this year and possibly this century -  Nixon's Comrades.  Nixon was clearly a complex figure and it is difficult to know how history might have portrayed him had Watergate not happened. As I have said in previous blogs he achieved a lot of positive actions the setting up of EPA, supporting the establishment of UNFPA and UNEP. America could have had universal health coverage in 1972 if they had accepted the proposal he put forward - similar to what Obama did in 2008 - 36 years later - bringing China into the family of nations as a UN member. This book also shows the role he played in making the world a little safer. I grew up during the cold war and the real threat of a nuclear summer. MAD for us was not only a great marvel comic but  stood for Mutely Assured Destruction (MAD).  I have always been an a avid reader of  political books such as Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days: A Memoi...