THE dog days of summer are upon us. Blast-furnace heat and humidity so sweltering that it straitjackets both your initiative and energy right through September or October.

It's a time of the year when newspaper editors and columnists start to fret about the dearth of news to report on because everyone in Bermuda seems to have gone into the summer-time version of hibernation.

Although I am not completely worn down at this point, I cannot help but notice that most of my fellow Bermudians are. There's a complete lack of substantive debate emanating from the House of Assembly, for instance.

And although the Bermuda Independence Commission is due to submit its final report on sovereignty in the very near future, I cannot imagine I am going to devote the whole summer to debating the question of Bermudian Independence in this column (a statement that will no doubt make some people happy).

However, since it is the beginning of summer it's perhaps appropriate for me to discuss some of the beach-reading that I've lined up ? the books I will be immersing myself in during the summer months. I have already picked out two volumes which I will be happily plunging into in the coming weeks.

Both deal with diverse subject matter but I believe they will prove to be interesting and one, in particular, may have some bearing on the future of Bermuda ? or, more accurately, it may help Bermudians better understand the consequences of past actions and events that are now manifesting themselves all around us.

The first book is titled by Thomas L. Friedman. Mr. Friedman is a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work as a journalist for the , where he serves as that paper's leading foreign affairs columnist.

He is the author of three best-selling books , which won him a National Book Award for non-fiction, (Understanding Globalisation) and

The material covered in his second book, seemsto have motivated him to pen his latest work, a further exploration of the impact of globalisation on the future development of the world.

Now, I have only just begun to read this book so the following should in no way be construed as a full review of but after only a few dozen pages it is easy enough to grasp the thrust of Friedman's argument. He opens with a short history of the world since Christopher Columbus began his quest to find a route to India (given the Muslims blocked the known routes to the East to Europeans).

He, of course, did not find that new route to India. But he was the first European since the Vikings to discover the vast land mass in the West which later would be known as the North and South American continents as well as the islands of what would be known as the Caribbean sea.

also proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that the world was in fact round ? not flat, which was the prevailing view in Europe during those times. Friedman argues that the concept of what we today call globalisation really had its beginnings in 1492 with the first sustained interaction between different peoples and different cultures from the Old and New Worlds. Columbus' discovery ushered in the era of international trade, warfare, colonialism and the development of a world economy.

In , Friedman identifies three distinct periods of globalisation. The first period began with Columbus in 1492 and ended around1800, the time when trade began between Europe and the Americas.

This was also a period that witnessed the rise of nationalism and the Independent nation state as well as industrialisation ? horsepower led to wind-powered means of manufacturing and finally steam-powered transportation and factory production, all of which aided the process of globalisation.

The early piecemeal European settlements in the New World laid the foundations for colonialism and, later, imperialism ? when the Great Powers in Europe carved up the globe between them into distinct and competing spheres of economic, military and political influence.

And, of course, religion also made its influence felt both within Europe and in the new territories the Europeans colonised, conquered or annexed. The rivalries and antagonisms between Roman Catholicism and the Protestant religions that sprang up during the Reformation were transferred to new peoples in new lands and made themselves felt around the globe.

The second period which Friedman identifies is the hundred-year span from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. This period witnessed the Great Depression and World Wars One and Two but also introduced the interconnected global economy we know today.

The two driving economic forces in this period were the emerging multinational companies (with their control of far-flung markets and labour forces) and the increasingly advanced means of communications they used to direct their global empires ? starting with the telegraph and telephone and leading up to the PC, satellites, fibre-optic cables and the beginning of the world-wide web.

The third period is the one we live in now. It's an era of what Friedman calls "full integration", with the whole world being tied together by this process we call globalisation. It is going to be a period of conflict and instability, with Friedman pointing to the emerging challenges that China and India are presenting to those Western countries that have traditionally dominated the international economic order.

Those Bermudians trying to understand the rapid (too rapid, most would say) rate of change in Bermuda over the last 20 years ? the transformation of a tourism-based economy into one based on off-shore financial services ? will want to read . They are better placed than most people to identify the consequences of globalisation taking place all around them.

The second book which I hope to finish reading this summer takes as its controversial subject the ongoing stand-off between entertainer and philanthropist Bill Cosby and some of the more dogmatic leaders of the American black community.

The book is titled Is Author Michael Eric Dyson has written many compelling books on the African-American experience and he takes Cosby to task for comments which he says amount to an attack on America's urban black poor.

writes about a growing economic and cultural divide between the American black middle class and the black underclass. He identifies Bill Cosby as a standard-bearer for the middle class, enunciating their increasingly critical views about the condition of America's black underclass. Again, this book may offer some clues about what's going on around us in Bermuda today.

No doubt both of these books will keep me busy over the summer and I'll report back to you with my own conclusions about their findings once I've finished them.

Now, a quick answer to the letter writer Aminu Wouba, who hails from Kumba, Cameroon.

Last week he criticised my recent comments concerning the sad state of affairs in Zimbabwe. I once admired and supported Robert Mugabe during the days when he was in the vanguard of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle.

But I can no longer support Mugabe. He has betrayed the liberation fighters who laid down their lives for a free Zimbabwe. He now makes war on his own people.

This pen is on the side of the oppressed. It can never support the actions of an oppressor ? which Robert Mugabe has proven to the world that he is.