Helping Syria through soup, Joseph Roth in hotels, Mona Lisa's grin, book covers in Weimar Era, Montreal's Chinatown: Cultural Digest August 26

• Some well-known chefs come together to publish a cookbook in order to aid Syrian refugees. A great indication that we can't all donate $20,000 nor can we hop a flight and work in a refugee camp on the border. But we can all do our part to remind the world that this crisis isn't over.
• On the occasion of Taschen's new book on book covers, Paris Review looks at a history of book covers and at the style and function of book covers during the Weimar Republic. Man, can Taschen do no wrong? I'd have 10 of their books if they didn't cost $150 a pop! I was in their shop in New York City once and could have spent $1,000. I didn't.
• Maisonneuve Magazine publishes a lovely little piece about Montreal's Chinatown. 
• We all recognize that self-satisfied smirk. Maybe not. New information about the intriguing smile of the Mona Lisa. 
• A new Joseph Roth collection (translated by one of the best translators in the world, honestly, Michael Hofman) comes out next month. This is a collection of Roth's journalism between the two World Wars as he battled alcoholism and attempted to re-establish his name and career after not being able to keep it together. What a brilliant mind and what an incredible writer.

The Problem with Humanitarian Aid

Haiti. Afghanistan. Sierra Leone. Congo. Countries with entire humanitarian aid industries that move in (or moved in many years ago), set up shop, and start doing work. Good work. But when does this good work become counterproductive and alleviate local leaders from their elected (or, indeed, self-appointed) responsibilities? When does this aid make people dependent? When do these aid agencies become tools of repressive, corrupt, or inept regimes? These are questions that writer Linda Polman asks in her book War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times.

Linda Polman

Fresh from an appearance in New York as part of PEN World Voices, Linda Polman will be onstage at Blue Met, talking with Dennis Trudeau about this unholy alliance between NGOs and oppressive governments or militaries. Polman writes:
 
If aid has become a strategic aspect of warfare, can the claim to neutrality made by humanitarian aid   organizations still be justified? Reduced to a single horrific episode in our own history, this dilemma becomes easier to comprehend. 


Imagine. It's 1943. You're an international aid worker. The telephone rings. It's the Nazis. You'll be granted permission to deliver aid to the concentration camps, but the camp management will decide how much of it goes to its own staff and how much to the prisoners. 


What do you do?


If you conform to the practices of the humanitarian aid industry, you'll deliver the supplies.

Dennis Trudeau

The example is meant to be provocative and even histrionic, but Polman's overriding point is quite clear: the "grey" areas into which aid industry leaders often move are veering ever closer to open collusion.

Originally from Holland, Linda Polman has lived in war-torn regions of the world for much of her career.Her 2004 book We Did Nothing takes a critical view of UN failures and weaknesses in war torn regions and was called, "A small classic of man's inhumanity to man" by the Sunday Telegraph.

Polman will be interviewed on stage by former CBC host Dennis Trudeau on Saturday, April 30th at 1pm at the Holiday Inn Select - Centreville. Get your tickets here.