Mohamed Nasheed is the former president of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean that is threatened by rising sea levels attributed to global warming. He stepped down as president earlier this year after the country’s police and military turned against him. He is the subject of the documentary “The Island President,” now in theaters.

READING A very interesting book I’ve been reading is a Maldivian book called “Orchid,” by Mohamed Jameel. It’s on the lynching of the Maldives’s first president in the 1950s. I am the fourth president. What the book describes has so much resonance to what is happening now. If I hadn’t resigned in February, they would have lynched me, too. I think if I had waited 10 more minutes, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

I’m also reading “The Blue Economy,” by Gunter Pauli, on sustainability and how we may be able to have a more carbon-neutral development pattern. I feel we should be moving more toward that kind of development strategy.

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And I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to fish out fiction about the current political situation in Egypt because what is happening there is so similar to what’s happening in the Maldives. I’ve often found fiction more useful — like, for example, Tom Sharpe’s books on South Africa.