Everyone except me has already read this Pulizter Prize-winning 1996 book, so it hardly needs me to add my comment, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
This book addresses the question of why Europe conquered America, and not vice-versa, or more generally why certain races and continents entered the modern era with materially rich, technologically […]
The Inheritance of Loss is magnificent. The writing is lovely, but what makes the book great is the fearlessness with which the author addresses the strange and difficult intermixing of rich and poor, white and brown and black, husband and wife, Hindu and Muslim, tribe versus tribe, not just in India but internationally, through the experience of foreign students and illegal immigrants. This book is fundamentally about the way people see each other through their differences, and like any truly good book it’s full of moments where you go, "yes, it’s like that." The difference here is that these moments make you cringe a little to see something ugly so revealed, both in others and yourself.
Go PKD! Another fine novel which fucks with reality itself. Like the best of holodeck plotlines, you’re never quite sure where you stand during the course of this book. It’s wildly imaginative; it’s paranoiac, it’s amazing. It’s the only time I’ve ever thought, hey, I wonder if it would be worth experiencing amphetamine psychosis just […]
Microcredit is, essentially, the loaning of very small sums of capital to very impoverished people. Yunnis began his career as an economics professor in a University in rural Bangladesh in the mid ’70s. At the time, there was a famine. People in the nearby village of Jobra were literally starving, too poor to afford the […]
Caring deeply about the problems of the world is the first step. Not everyone cares to care.
Understanding thoroughly these problems comes next. They are wide and deep.
Being able to suggest solutions based on the best of human knowledge is the rarest skill of all. Very few people are in a position to do this.
A […]
This book annoys me but I like it. Or it’s a great book which also pisses me off. I’ve always been sort of ambivalent about Paulo Cohello, and I wish I understood why.
The theme is very straightforward. A young woman feels that the rest of her life will hold nothing new for her, and tries […]
This is the second Russian novel I’ve liked, but probably not as much as I should have.
I always get a little antsy writing my comments about famous books, because there’s so much pressure to agree that these works are indeed classic. If you didn’t like it, the silent implication goes, then you just didn’t […]
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
I must admit, I was somewhat disappointed by this book. It failed to blow my head off quite as much as it seems to have done for other readers. It is not that this is a bad book; in fact, I am duly impressed by the energy, depth […]
In my younger years, I consumed a lot of science fiction. I read Clarke, Asimov, Card, Herbert, all the classic masters and a lot of the lesser lights besides. Somewhere in the late nineties I discovered Iain M. Banks, first stumbling into the epic Against A Dark Background. Being used to rigorously researched treatises that […]
I’d never read Rushdie before. I can see why he has a Jihad against him — even in this book which only incidentally addresses religion, he is not shy about saying he sees no place for it. But that is beside the point. Rushdie is, truly, a brilliant writer.
The story is something about two kids […]
