A few weeks before he was assassinated in 1947, Gandhi handed his grandson Arun a list of 'Seven Blunders, ' out of which, Gandhi claimed, springs the violence of crime, rebellion, and war that plagues the world. He considered these 'Seven Blunders of the World' as dangerous to humanity, as 'disbalances' that will kill us. In this book Ron Duffy picks up on Ghandi's idea but replaces Ghandi's Seven Blunders with what he calls Seven Social Evils which have arisen in modern times and left to continue unchecked will eventually-and he does not doubt it-create a world that is unfit for human life. In his Dedication to Pope Francis he quotes from the Pontiff's encyclical Laudato Si: "A sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly." That is the world to which Duffy's Social Evils is inevitably leading us. They are, in alphabetical order: Apathy, Cruelty, Fundamentalism, Greed, Ignorance, Inequality, and Mali
About the Author: Born Northern Ireland, Ron spent three years cycling round Eastern and Western Europe. He then obtained a BA in Geography from the Queen's University of Belfast, emigrated to Canada, took an MSc at the University of Calgary, and studied for his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. In Montreal he started a long career as a university lecturer in Geography. His writing career began as a freelance journalist. Then McGill-Queen's University Press published his book, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War, and Libros Libertad has recently published The Unquiet Land, the first novel in a Northern Irish trilogy. In addition he has self-published two novels The Janus Web and Crossed Lives, both available from Amazon as ebooks or paperbacks. Crossed Lives received an Honorable Mention at the 2012 New York Book Festival. His only play, Hearts and Minds, won a first prize in the Alberta Playwriting Competition. He is now working on a historical novel, O'Hanlon, based on the life of a 17th-century Irish highwayman. He is married, has two sons, and lives in Surrey, British Columbia, with his Canadian wife, Joanne, and two Jack Russell terriers.