2022 reads, #34. The main reason I accepted a review copy of this book when author Ravi Mangla first reached out to me is that I could see it was publ2022 reads, #34. The main reason I accepted a review copy of this book when author Ravi Mangla first reached out to me is that I could see it was published by Spuyten Duyvil, a legendary indie press that indie-press people mention to other indie-press people to prove they're "in the know" about the subject, much like how bartenders signal their profession to other bartenders by ordering a shot of Fernet-Branca when out drinking themselves (you can have that one for free, people). And indeed, this is exactly the kind of book I would expect from the notoriously leftist press, the story of a leftist Western reporter who has come to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to report on its current authoritarian government (the details are unimportant; Mangla only gives us such vague clues as that the old Silk Road runs through the nation, that it used to be a part of the Roman Empire, and that the American CIA set up a corrupt anti-communist puppet regime there in the 1950s that eventually led to a conservative religious coup, which could describe one of a half-dozen modern nations in that region), just to be arrested and jailed by the secret police, tortured for whatever information he might have on the dissident-couple friends he briefly visited when first arriving, then unceremoniously dumped back on Western soil once done.
As such, then, like a lot of leftist political novels, the main point of this book is to be admired for existing, not necessarily enjoyed as an actual pleasure read; and while that was just enough to propel me through its short page count (it can be read in its entirety in a single afternoon), I must admit that I normally don't like these kinds of preachy, go-nowhere books that were deliberately written with a political agenda in mind beforehand, and so I personally found it to be an only mediocre reading experience, reflected in my middle-of-the-road score. If you like plotless leftist political books more than me, then you should certainly pick this up; but if you're like me and can either take or leave such books, today's one of those days to leave it....more
DID NOT FINISH. When I first added this to my TBR list, I was under the impression that it was a history book, one that would take a look at the estabDID NOT FINISH. When I first added this to my TBR list, I was under the impression that it was a history book, one that would take a look at the establishment of the first rabbinical courts back in the Age of Antiquity to show how they directly tie to our modern secular justice systems in the here and now; but it turns out to instead be an academic book of literary analysis, looking at select passages from the Jewish bible to argue that, out of all the societies that existed in the Age of Antiquity, it was the Israelites who invented many of the fundamental concepts of our modern ethical beliefs, such as that it's good to take care of the poor and needy, etc. As such, then, although I'm adding it here so that it'll count towards this year's reading challenge, and to remind me in the future that I did once already try to take this on, I actually read so little of it to not even have an opinion on whether or not it's any good, which should be kept in mind when deciding whether to pick it up yourself. ...more
A few years ago I added to my literary bucket list the challenge of reading the Christian Bible from cover to cover; but since I'm an atheist who knows little about biblical history, this means that to do a thorough job at it, I also need to read several dozen other books on Judaism, Middle Eastern history, the history of Bible interpretation, the history of early Christianity, and more. It's a daunting task, which is why I keep putting off really throwing myself into the middle of it; but for this summer reading challenge, I thought I'd at least start with this short and plain-written guide to the Bible's history, construction, and two thousand years of different interpretative schools of thought. If like me you know almost nothing about these subjects, this primer by comparative religion scholar Karen Armstrong is a great place to start, in that she often delves into some really simple subjects (for one early example, what the exact relation is between the Christian Bible and the various holy books of Judaism, and how they all went from normal books to "holy" in the first place), but without ever being simplistic or overly patronizing, a sophisticated look at some basic topics that is perfect for the budding intellectual who's not sure where to start with this overwhelming subject. It served as a great entrance to the rabbithole I'll be descending more and more over the coming few years. ...more
DID NOT FINISH. Although this book certainly takes on a fascinating conceit -- that it was actually Alexander the Great's father, Philip II, who laid DID NOT FINISH. Although this book certainly takes on a fascinating conceit -- that it was actually Alexander the Great's father, Philip II, who laid most of the groundwork for Alexander's later famous exploits, while it was his generals after his death who did most of the hard work of establishing the "Hellenistic World" that Alexander usually gets the credit for -- unfortunately, like a lot of history books about Classicism, this feels like the publisher took someone's dry, tedious doctoral thesis and slapped a pretty cover on it, with the text getting into so much minutiae about minor regional chieftains and the endless skirmishes that led to their defeats that a general reader like me will soon find themselves bored out of their skull. I actually made it further into this book than I was expecting, about halfway altogether, but I too eventually gave up out of sheer tedium. ...more
It's clear right in the very first chapter of Nejoud Al-Yagout's new novel-in-stories Motorbikes and Camels, when we listen in to a group of teenage MIt's clear right in the very first chapter of Nejoud Al-Yagout's new novel-in-stories Motorbikes and Camels, when we listen in to a group of teenage Muslim girls talk about how to best take ecstasy and have premarital sex without getting caught, that the author is not that interested in presenting a shining example of the piousness of Islam; instead, this is a look at the practical realities of modern flawed humans when it comes to this ancient and sometimes antiquated religion, a thoroughly 21st-century story from this celebrated Kuwaiti poet and feminist pioneer.
A series of interlinked short stories, where we hop from one young person to the next within a group of acquaintances at a Muslim university, the novel is a soap-operaish yet deeply character-based look at the contemporary relationship problems inherent in a society that still largely practices arranged marriages; one person we follow is a closeted homosexual, one a secret alcoholic, one from an enlightened family but who suffers from everyone else's disdain for them, a series of warm bodies passing each other in the night while trying to figure out their place in their newly adult world. Their tales are always engaging and believable, and I suspect will be especially enjoyable to other young Muslims who find themselves in these same situations.
Granted, the book has its problems, mostly related to this poetry veteran still finding her mature voice as a writer of prose; the dialogue can sometimes get stilted, the pacing is often uneven (in the first story, we watch a girl lose her virginity, get married, get divorced, go through a spiritual reawakening, then eventually become a New Age vegan, all in the space of a few thousand words), and I wish that Al-Yagout had established its Middle Eastern setting earlier in the manuscript than she does. (This story comes across very differently if imagining it taking place within a diasporic community in a secular Western country; for example, we don't even find out that alcohol is illegal in whatever place they are until almost a quarter of the way through the book, which gives a whole different flavor to the early scenes where 19-year-olds swig whiskey before having sloppy, drunk sex.)
Still, though, I was highly entertained by Motorbikes and Camels, as well as legitimately moved in several sections, an earnest and relatively daring look at Muslims who are always in their hearts trying to do the right thing, but who so often get sidetracked by hormones, controlled substances, politics, and the other diversions of our modern times. It comes generally recommended, and especially to other young Muslims looking for something highly relatable. ...more
DID NOT FINISH. Just on my own, it's doubtful I would've ever read or even heard of the writers of the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web," which is theDID NOT FINISH. Just on my own, it's doubtful I would've ever read or even heard of the writers of the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web," which is the ultimate irony of our age; for my more radically liberal friends at Twitter keep crowing so much about how all the IDW writers are the Antichrist that it's inspired me to now read them just to see what all the fuss is about. Earlier this year I tackled Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, whose review you can read here (the tl;dr version: I agreed with a lot of it, disagreed with some of it, understood why it would be offensive to many, but was ultimately put off by Peterson's smug, sanctimonious tone); and next I thought I'd tackle similarly notorious boogeyman Sam Harris (best-known as one of the "Atheist Assholes" of the 21st century, along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), and currently have four of his five books lined up on my Kindle and ready to go.
I thought I'd start with his newest, 2015's Islam and the Future of Tolerance, the book that's been getting him in the most trouble with radical liberals, written as a book-length "conversation" with fellow IDW author Maajid Nawaz, a former revolutionary jihadist turned liberal Islam reformer; and while I didn't find it particularly bad or offensive, I ended up giving up on it about a third of the way in anyway, because it turns out that Harris and Nawaz have exactly one unique thing to say in this entire book, and just keep repeating that one thing over and over in different forms and while tackling different shades of the same subject. That subject? Well, hold on to your hats, because you may very well find this to be the most shocking thing you've heard this decade: It turns out that some human beings use the things they believe in as an excuse to inflict violence on other people who don't believe in those things! And that Muslims are also members of the human race who do this too! Holy crap, what a bombshell!!!
I exaggerate for humorous effect, of course; the book is actually slightly more expansive than this, although admittedly almost entirely because of Nawaz, who takes the trouble to give us a fascinating breakdown of what exact kinds of political schools of thought there are within the expansive world of Islam, the history of how these schools of thoughts coalesced over the decades, and how they combined and contrasted during the Arab Spring revolutions of the previous decade. Harris, meanwhile, contributes almost nothing interesting to the conversation except for endless repeats of statements along the lines of, "So we're agreed, then, that every Muslim who has ever existed is a violent psychopath who has no problem with cutting off the hands of his neighborhood McDonald's employee because Sharia law commands him to?"; then when Nawaz once again refuses to rise to his bait, Harris endlessly responds with, "Look, you're not giving me the answer I want to hear, so let me rephrase the question I just asked you in the hopes that this time you will."
Ultimately the two are arguing the same thing, only with Nawaz doing so with a lot more nuance and intelligence, just that the thing they're arguing isn't particularly interesting or groundbreaking -- namely, that there are a bunch of Muslims these days who are using Islam as an excuse to commit acts of random violence -- which after all can be exactly said about a bunch of Christians these days, a bunch of Jewish people these days, and a bunch of atheist secular liberals these days for that matter. Once I realized that they weren't going to say anything else besides this, I rapidly lost interest in finishing the book, as will any other reasonably intelligent person who already understands that religions incorporate a lot of different schools of thought, and that some of those schools of thought are regressive and violent. Granted, Harris goes way overboard with his generalizations about this subject, the main reason that far-left liberals can't stand him (his main argument is that Islam is tailor-made for a violently regressive interpretation, that there is no such thing as a "moderate Muslim," and that Muslims threaten to destroy our planet because of it); and he has the same problem as Jordan Peterson too, which is that his smug, self-important, prick-like tone of voice when pronouncing these over-generalizations is actually working against the manytimes very reasonable things he has to say. But I imagine we'll be getting a lot more into that part of Harris's problems as a writer when I tackle his next book, 2014's Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. ...more
Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018.Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018....more
DECLINED TO REVIEW. I don't quite know what it is that causes about a third of all expat novels I read to fall flat into complete unreadability to me,DECLINED TO REVIEW. I don't quite know what it is that causes about a third of all expat novels I read to fall flat into complete unreadability to me, like was the case with Rose McGinty's Electric Souk, with which I spent an entire month forcing myself through the first 100 pages before finally giving up. I suppose it's the same thing that makes expat travel diaries so unreadable to me as well, which is that so many of them are these lifeless logs of blase activities ("It was hot today; I visited a historic mosque; then my mates and I had an ale at an Irish pub") that the author thinks adds up to legitimate literature, but is really no more compelling than someone's discarded shopping list. This is exacerbated in McGinty's case by her decision to make the main "drama" of her book the administrative soap operas of a medical clinic in an (I think unnamed?) Arabian nation-state, which absolutely is not a substitute for a legitimately compelling narrative ("Oh no! The money for the clinic has been stolen by the corrupt medical board! Whatever will happen?"); she then alternates these scenes with ones of the expat staff getting drunk every night at an expat bar and bitching about all the administrative soap operas of their medical clinic, which is absolutely not a substitute for compelling character development. Based on the book's synopsis, I'm assuming the storyline gets a lot more exciting deeper into it; but that's worthless if you can't get through the pages leading up to the exciting part, like was the case with me. I no longer assign scores to books I don't finish, but it's safe to say that I don't recommended this. ...more
(As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction (As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction listing there.)
So why should a serious book collector pay any attention to a volume that's less than ten years old, by an author who has otherwise not proven that she has any lasting power within the literary industry? Because Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love may in fact turn out to be the absolute perfect book to chronicle for future historians exactly what it was like to be a middle-class white suburban American female in the years following 9/11, a period that is bound to become a point of obsession for those in the future studying the US's rise and fall as a global superpower. A reluctant suburbanite who had just gone through a bitter divorce, the mid-thirties Gilbert found herself in the early 2000s mentally adrift, a confessed "self-help junkie" who was trying every gimmicky piece of advice that landed her way, being force-fed a diet of anti-depressive medication against her wishes but too afraid of the alternative to stop them. Within such a moment of mid-life crisis, then, she made the radical decision to sell all her things, get rid of her New York apartment, and spend a year doing nothing but traveling to what she called the "three I's" -- Italy (to indulge a random desire to learn the language), India (to delve more seriously into her recent conversion to Hinduism), and Indonesia (specifically to Bali, to spend four months as the personal assistant to a "village elder" she previously met during her job as a globe-trotting magazine journalist).
The results of this year-long trek are charming and infectious, and it's no surprise that the book remained on the NYT bestseller list for a whopping 187 weeks straight, later made into a high-profile movie produced by Brad Pitt and starring Julia Roberts. And that's because Gilbert cuts through the usual "chick-lit" filler here, having the courage to take a cruelly hard look at her mistakes and her weaknesses, and showing how spending a year letting go of every expectation she had had about life was ironically the best thing she could've ever done for that life. It's a call for simplicity, spirituality and anti-materialism that resonated profoundly with tens of millions of women in the same position as her, which says a lot about the point of runaway consumerism and moral bankruptcy the US had reached by the beginning of the 21st century; and it doesn't hurt that the book is also laugh-out-loud funny at points, moving sometimes to the point of tears, and just so happens to hit all the usual beats of a typical romantic comedy but this time in real life. A perfect gift for a fan of the book who wants to have a closer relationship with the original text, this first printing in flawless condition is being offered at a price specifically for young beginning collectors, those looking to add important titles to their library now when no one else is thinking of them, to ripen and age like a fine wine into the valuable commodities they'll one day be. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
It wasn't until publishing Kevin Haworth's 2012 essay collection Famous Drownings in Literary History that I learned for the first time about the Jewish institution known as the kibbutz, a concept that is part practical and part political; in reality not much more than a collectively owned farm in the style of '60s hippie communes, the part that's important to Judaism is that they were founded by the very first "Zionists" who in the 1910s moved to the region now known as Israel, explicitly to establish a nation for Jewish people where none had existed for thousands of years, and it was these mostly Eastern European radical socialists who believed that the key to a "Jewish state" was the embrace of these communist-style cooperatives, even going so far to believe that such collective farms would transform the deserts of the Middle East and eventually bring peace between Jews and Muslims.
As American non-Jew David Leach points out in his fascinating new personal-essay collection, Chasing Utopia, although it's considered a duty by every Jewish person worldwide to regularly spend volunteer time at a Israeli kibbutz, these organizations also accept volunteers from all walks of life, Jewish or not; and back in the '70s and '80s when Leach was a youth, such kibbutzes were considered by many young people to be "the place where backpacking college students went on holiday when they didn't have any money" (or so once said Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon, merely one of thousands of such '70s youths to spend a summer on one of these farms, helped immensely by kibbutzes' reputations as places where the liquor flowed freely and sexual opportunities were easy). That's what led Leach to spend a summer at a kibbutz himself, an experience he would fondly remember with hazy nostalgia well into his middle-aged years as a Catholic Canadian journalist; but one day thirty years later, he happened to catch an item on the news about one of these kibbutzes recently filing an initial public stock offering (IPO) for their brand-new high-tech startup, which made him realize that the very nature of these organizations had gone through a radical transformation during the last half of the Postmodernist Era.
That's what Chasing Utopia basically is, a record of Leach's revisit to Israel for the first time in decades to learn what's happened to the collective farms he so warmly remembered from his youth, a trip that took him on a circular tour of the entire country and that entailed dozens of probing interviews with the remaining communards, government officials, NGO personnel, and fellow journalists. And the results are gripping: profoundly scaled back in number from hundreds to now dozens, the kibbutzes still remaining in Israel have largely been forced through economic circumstances to abandon their old collective roots, transforming themselves into traditionally capitalist, publicly held corporations, ones that have largely given up on agriculture to specialize instead in such 21st-century items as transistors, high-quality mirrors for medical equipment, and even cutting-edge women's razors. And in the meanwhile, as the politics of the region have continued to get even more fractured and complex with every passing year, instead of less like the originally Zionist founders of modern Israel envisioned, this too has had an effect on the kibbutzes, propagandized as a source of nationalist pride by conservatives (with the resulting terrorist attacks by Palestinians you would expect), while being held up as a bold experiment for inter-faith peace by liberals.
The lovely thing about a book like this being written by a non-Jew like Leach is that you don't have to be Jewish yourself to follow along with the issues; Leach approaches these subjects exactly like the disinterested outsider he is, and in many ways this is a great exercise in traditional journalism that helps explain these complicated issues in a clear and balanced way. But what makes the book even more interesting is Leach's personal connection to it all, which is why the sum of this book's chapters is a bigger whole than simply an addition of its parts, and why you couldn't just run these chapters as individual articles in a place like The Huffington Post; for in the spirit of 21st-century personal essay, Leach delicately weaves his personal story into these traditional journalism pieces, not afraid to express his own opinions about the things he's seeing and the people he's talking to. It makes for a fascinating book when all is said and done, my favorite type of nonfiction and the kind of book I would've published if it had been submitted to CCLaP; and it comes strongly recommended to one and all today, a book inherently interesting to those already familiar with the subjects at hand, and a book that will likely make you interested if you never have been before.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
I was disappointed to stop by the Goodreads page for Dilip Hiro's The Age of Aspiration, as part of researching this review, and see that not a single writeup besides mine has been posted there; that's a real shame, because out of the half-dozen or so books I've read in the last several years on contemporary Indian society, this is easily the smartest and most insightful out of all of them, an incredibly dense 400 pages that attempts to tie together the rising capitalist middle-class in that soon-to-be-superpower nation, the decaying remnants of the old socialist system that still mainly informs the governmental agencies, the uncontrollable corruption within that system that has inspired this completely separated new layer of middle-class capitalism (one that's essentially being slapped on top of the old layer, with no attempts whatsoever to integrate the two), the rising Maoist terrorist activities within the rural mining regions that is a direct result of this new capitalist layer, the complicated ties between Indian business and the Western partnerships in America and Great Britain, and a whole lot more, all by a veteran journalist whose controversial 1976 India Today originally got him banned by a very unhappy Indira Gandhi. Now, granted, this is a difficult book to get through; loaded down with facts and figures, and nimbly dancing across a century-plus of history mostly unknown to Americans (ugh, and all those hundreds of unpronounceable names), this is not going to be an easy read for Westerners like me who know only the absolute basics about Indian politics, business and culture; but believe me when I say that the slog is worth it, or at least for those who want a data-heavy, policy-oriented look at why things in the Subcontinent are so complicated and fractured here in the 2010s. For those people, this comes strongly recommended; but for those who don't think they're up for the task, you would be best off staying away from this book altogether.
Out of 10: 7.8, or 9.3 for fans of wonky, policy-heavy nonfiction ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
In a universe where I'm now reading and reviewing several hundred novels every single year, it's always a portentous occasion when one of them slows me down to a crawl merely because I don't want to miss anything that's being said; and that's what's made me realize what a special thing I've had on my hands for the last month with Gail Hareven's Lies, First Person, originally published in her native Hebrew in 2008 but with an English version only coming out late last year, thanks to the tireless Open Letter Books which exists only to publish such complicated literature in translation.
At its heart, it's a domestic thriller with a killer hook: the feisty middle-aged heroine, who grew up Jewish in Israel, once had an uncle who was a respected academe, until he published an instantly controversial biography of Hitler in which he tried to "humanize" the dictator by writing it first-person, and who as part of his "journey to understanding evil" ended up raping and intellectually torturing the heroine's mentally challenged sister while she was a pre-teen, a fact that never came out publicly but that tore her family apart in differing ways for each person. Now it's thirty years later and this long-lost monster is back out on a high-profile "apology tour," renouncing the book that once made his career, and has asked our narrator if she'd be willing to meet with him when he's scheduled to lecture in Jerusalem in a few months. (That's about the minimum you need to know in order to understand the book's main thrust, although be aware that the story goes off in several other interesting directions besides just this.)
This would be fascinating enough, but then Hareven writes the actual novel in what I like to call a "Judaic style of literature," based on how I saw CCLaP author Kevin Haworth write his essay collection for us a few years ago, Famous Drownings in Literary History; not quite a straight narrative, not quite memoir, partly self-aware and partly getting lost in the story, with humor and drama flip-flopping on a page-by-page basis. That's what makes the book such a linguistic delight, apart from the very sober but fascinating plot being unwound (and it's a very rewarding plot, make no mistake, one that would make for a fine adaptation into an indie film); it's not told in a straightforward style at all, but rather a wry, metafictional, self-knowing one, a style that relies on symbolism and metaphor, fable-telling and postmodernist revisionist fable-telling, and no wonder that it took a really special publisher like Open Letter to get the subtle translation from Hebrew right. (For those who don't know, Open Letter is much like the Criterion Collection from the film world -- dedicated nerdy professionals who are obsessively devoted to technical quality within the arts, in this case with doing artistically faithful translations of books that are notoriously difficult to translate.)
A book with something for everyone, it will be a real treat for those who like their literature dense, European-flavored, and culturally significant; but it's a hell of a beach-style page-turner too, and you're never quite sure what the exciting ending of this story is going to be until you actually get to it. It comes strongly recommended today for one and all, and will undoubtedly be making our best-of lists at the end of the year.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although there's nothing particularly outstanding about Mike Robbins' The Nine Horizons, travel fans will want to pick up a copy anyway, simply because it's such a solid and strong example of a classic travelogue based on real experiences. Split into nine chapters detailing nine trips the British author made throughout the 1980s and '90s, this has the formal tone of an older travel writer like George Orwell, a certain primness to the proceedings that helps keep the sometimes outrageous stories about exotic locations in check; and I must admit, it's fascinating to read so long after the fact Robbins' political observations about certain areas of the world that were once hotbeds twenty or thirty years ago but no longer are (or are sometimes hot again for entirely different reasons, like his entertaining account of a pre-Arab-Spring Syria). Although not a genre-crossing "must read" even for people who don't particularly like travelogues, it certainly should go in your to-be-read list if you are, an illuminating and well-done series of vignettes that kept me quickly turning pages until I was done.
Out of 10: 8.3, or 9.3 for fans of travel writing ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
You wouldn't expect one of the best books of the year to be one of those self-published "Kindle Store Specials" with the generic clip-art cover and bad pun for a title that get made fun of at smartass Tumblr accounts; but that's exactly the case with J.R. Roth's Sheikhs, Lies and Real Estate, which arrived in CCLaP's mailbox almost a year ago and ended up being so riveting that I missed bus stops several times while reading it. And to be clear, it's not for Roth's actual writing style that one reads this, serviceable in a workmanlike way but no great shakes; it's instead for his mesmerizing story of a young British man of Arab descent getting nowhere in the bottom rungs of London's financial industry, and moving to Dubai just exactly when things got their craziest there, not coincidentally right in the middle of the Bush years as well.
See, just to give as fast a primer as I can for those who need it, a certain amount of what we in the West call the "Middle East" -- the Arabian peninsula, to be precise -- is still under the control of just a handful of thousand-year-old royal families, all of whom found themselves insanely wealthy starting in the 1960s when oil was found under all their lands. But some of these rulers have acknowledged that this oil money is one day destined to dry up, and that things need to be done with that money now to establish a new source of long-term revenue; and the king (emir) of one of these places, Dubai, decided that what they should do is become the new premiere tourist destination for the entire world, a sort of combination Disney World, Caribbean island and Switzerland that caters particularly to the super-rich. And this was in the 1990s when this was being dreamed up, back when the real-estate bubble seemed like it was never going to burst; and so this was a key part of the plan, to literally create a real-estate boom in Dubai out of thin air, and I mean "literally out of thin air" as in the emir had hundreds of manmade islands built off the coast from scratch, to be sold to billionaires so they could build mansions on them. And meanwhile on the coast, where terraforming was happening faster than anyone could keep up, was where the majority of the real-estate money was exchanging hands -- through an endless series of 100-story condo towers in "development" along this terraformed coastline (i.e. existing on paper only), which during the height of the frenzy you could buy for a million dollars one morning and flip for two million by that afternoon.
This is the game that our main character moves to Dubai to become a player of, and his story is fascinating -- a combination of well-done factual research, tutorials on how the speculative real-estate market works, and salacious anecdotes about partying with princes, condo agents who moonlight as out-and-out prostitutes, becoming a regular at the world's only seven-star hotel, and doing business with the kinds of clients who think nothing of blowing $50,000 just on a night of drinks and barhopping with friends. And that's what made this book so surprising, is that it's not just a concentration on one of these things or another -- the salacious anecdotes alone would simply be another Sex In The City, while just the facts would be simply another Esquire article -- but the combination of them, along with the narrator's evermore ethically complicated descent into this world, that makes this manuscript so readable and riveting. A personal yet impersonal look at one of the most interesting crash-and-burn stories of the entire 9/11 period, which follows events all the way up to the Great Recession flood of hasty exits so many people made from the city (Dubai has no bankruptcy laws, so even missing a rent payment can get you thirty years in jail, which in post-Recession times has led to infamous stories about their international airport's parking garage being choked with abandoned Lamborghinis), this is both one of the most informative and most entertaining books I've ended up reading in 2013, and will undoubtedly be making CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
This is one of those books about foreign culture that I like the best, where someone will both detail the various things that everyday people in another area of the world might do that might seem strange to us Americans, and explain why they do them; and it's especially fascinating in this case, because of covering the "Arab World," which like the "Islamic World" is a term mostly made up by Westerners to try to easily explain something that doesn't have an easy explanation. (Think for example of mashing together Irish, Latin and African Catholics, in order to explain in a single short statement the "Christian World.") And indeed, that's one of the first things that scholar Margaret K. Nydell makes clear, that there's a difference between Arab society and Islamic society, with there being a lot of overlap for sure but some very specific differences too; and that's basically the start of a long and informing look at all the normal parts of Arab life that might seem weird to us, from the routine overuse of both praise and damnation to the sometimes draconian dress codes of some nations, why straight men hold hands in public but not men and women, and a lot more. Now in its fifth edition, this is a lively anecdotal guide that will help clueless Americans like me to better understand and appreciate their Arab neighbors, and comes strongly recommended to those even with just a passing interest.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Regular readers know that in the last several years, I've been giving myself a crash course of sorts all about the regions we in the West refer to as the Middle East and Southeast Asia, mostly because these areas are becoming more and more important by the day in world affairs, and like most Americans I don't know the least little freaking thing about any of them; but unfortunately, I've learned that most of the contemporary books coming out these days that purport to teach us Westerners more about these regions usually fail at one extreme or another, being either overly simplistic book-length Wikipedia entries that teach nothing about what it's like to actually live there right now, or glorified doctoral theses with a mainstream-friendly cover slapped on the front, full of obscure political theories and lots of demographic data but failing to give the reader a good overall look at the area. But not so with India Calling, an almost perfect balance of these elements by Anand Giridharadas, accomplished mostly by the circumstances of him being a youngish intellectual Indian-American who wished and then got a long-term job with the New York Times to cover the subcontinent, moving there permanently after an American childhood filled with old stories and frequent vacations, which allows him not only to be an outsider and insider at once, but also to simultaneously understand the culture and history behind all the 21st century "quiet revolutions" going on there right now and still be surprised and somewhat awestruck by it all as well.
And of course, it helps quite a bit that Giridharadas's job as a journalist specifically sends him into a whole variety of fascinating situations on a regular basis, where he uses his keen intellect to not only report on what he sees but interpret to Americans why it's so important; and so from his time spent with a former "untouchable" who has entrepreneurially transformed himself into a laptop-owning middle-class motivational speaker, to a day at a rural and largely improvised "family court" system, to his talk with one of the richest and most powerful media moguls in the country, Giridharadas brings a mesmerizing sense of place and society to each of the strange little things he examines, giving us perhaps the best overall "insider's" view of Indian life in the 21st century that English speakers have now seen. A huge recommendation whether or not you're specifically interested in India itself, precisely because you will be after finishing no matter what your attitude was before, India Calling absolutely makes me want to now seek out Giridharadas's newspaper columns on a more timely basis, in the same kind of exhilarated way that I felt about Malcolm Gladwell after reading The Tipping Point.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Like millions of other Americans, I am in the active process these days of increasing my knowledge base regarding the Middle East and Southeast Asia, from its former level of "zero" to a new level of "more than zero." But this of course immediately presents a problem to armchair scholars -- namely, with a subject so vast, where do you even start when you know literally nothing? For example, it's definitely important to understand the complex feudal empires that ruled these areas during what's known in the West as the Middle Ages, although such study doesn't even begin to explain the region in the here and now; but by concentrating solely on contemporary issues, one misses entirely the strong cultural background that led to these attitudes in the first place. Do you filter all your information through the all-important subject of religion in this section of the world? If so, then how do you begin to understand the actions of West-friendly reformers? But then without a solid grounding of religious education, how do you even begin to understand something like the Taliban, and why they seemingly have a surprising amount of support from people who aren't particularly violent or reactionary themselves?
So thank God, then, for books like the recent and fantastic The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd, because it's actually several things at once -- not just a primer on historical issues regarding the old Persian Empire, but a field guide to the modern Iran it became, an on-the-ground report about daily life inside a working theocracy, even a funny Bill-Bryson-style travelogue about a clueless Westerner smoking opium with random strangers, participating in a self-flagellation festival, and going skiing at a bling-bling-filled Muslim mountain resort. And in fact Majd is in a uniquely great position to be telling a story like this; after all, he was born into an Iranian family of high political influence (both during the last years of the Shah and the first years of the Islamic Republic that came after), but then eventually moved to New York and became a senior executive within the entertainment industry (and a contributing writer to Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, back when it was still good), making him simultaneously an insider and outsider to modern Iranian culture, about as perfect a position to be in to relate to fellow Americans exactly what daily life is like over there these days.
And indeed, over the course of several trips he makes there during the waning years of the Bush administration, Majd presents us with a nation profoundly more complex than most Americans even have a clue concerning, a place where the historical and modern clash in sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic ways -- a society that in theory is an open democracy, with public elections and a strong emphasis on basic human rights, yet ruled at the top by a circle of religious experts whose judgments are not allowed to be questioned, a country that creates elaborate public dress codes but are then ignored by half the population with no repercussions (well, except around elections, when conservative candidates will initiate morality crackdowns to look good in the eyes of voters, almost exactly what you see during American elections as well). And in fact that's probably Majd's most surprising conclusion of all, that current Iran is not actually too terribly different than Bush's America in the early 2000s, a "free" society but full of draconian rules but that most citizens then promptly ignore, leading back to that free society it's supposed to be, but with the whole thing manifested in this overly complicated, seemingly contradictory way.
And Majd tells us this story in a great way too, by gaining access to events and people that he can only pull off by being from a politically connected family -- over the course of this easily readable 250-page manuscript, we get to sit in on interviews with high-ranking government officials, attend booze-and-pot-filled parties full of urban liberal hipsters, witness a series of ultra-conservative religious rituals in the country's rural wastelands (think the Islamic version of a Pentecostal tent revival in the Deep South, full of writhing true believers speaking in tongues), and of course eavesdrop on a whole series of private home-based salons and dinner parties, centered around middle-class family gardens and friendly afternoon opium sessions (the Iranian equivalent of cigars and cocktails among businessmen), which is where the vast majority of the nation's collective decisions are very quietly made. And this of course is the biggest contradiction of all concerning modern Iran, as Majd so deftly shows us through conversation and example, the simultaneous superiority and inferiority complexes that most Iranians suffer from (caused respectively from the clash between their ancient Persian past and more recent colonial days), resulting in a society where among other things one is perfectly free to publicly criticize the government, just as long as you don't do it too loudly or attract too much attention (and wow, talk about the Bush years in a nutshell).
It's a fascinating book full of all kinds of surprising and paradigm-shifting conclusions, and I have to admit that I've had my entire worldview concerning Iran profoundly change just from this book alone. It's the perfect kind of informational title for most Americans, funny and entertaining even as it teaches much-needed basic lessons about Islam and Persia, and it comes today highly recommended to nearly every person on the planet, Iranians themselves included.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
Regular readers will know that I'm already a big fan of religion journalist Lesley Hazleton, and especially after reading her bewitching Jezebel last year, in which through historical texts and contemporary journeys through the Holy Land she argued that who we've traditionally thought of as the "Whore of Babylon" was actually a tolerant, wise and popular leader in her day, forced by necessity into a villainous role by the war-mongering, monotheistic early Christians precisely in order to justify their monotheistic war-mongering. And now Hazleton has released her latest, After the Prophet, which does something pretty simple which is why I don't have a lot to say about it -- it tells in plain language the various Islamic legends of the 7th century that led to the split in their religion between so-called "Shia" and "Sunni" denominations, which Westerners can think of as the Muslim equivalent of the Protestant/Catholic split in Christianity (and which the Bush administration claimed didn't exist, which is why they argued that a transition in Iraq from a Sunni-led Saddam Hussein regime to a US-backed Shiite government would present no complications).
Yeah, as you can see, most of us could really benefit from learning a little more about this historic rift, especially since we currently have several hundreds of thousands of soldiers over there right now in the middle of all this in-fighting; and that's exactly what Hazleton's book does, is explain this rift in a way so that it's easy for Americans to follow along, but while still honoring the complexity of the story itself. It's fascinating and engaging, a balanced book which tries to be as fair as possible to both sides of the Shia/Sunni argument*, but is also a fairly straight-ahead book which is why I don't have a lot to say about it; despite the short review today, it comes highly recommended.
Out of 10: 9.3
*Now, that said, it did seem to me that Hazleton at least slightly favors the Shiites over the Sunnis; but I don't know if that's because she actually did so, or because I as an individual read both sides and just personally favored the Shia argument over the Sunni one. And what a strange realization to make, by the way, as an American who was raised as a Bible-thumping Southern Baptist; that if I were to convert to Islam tomorrow, I would almost undoubtedly be a Shiite Muslim instead of a Sunni**.
**Oh, who are we kidding? If I did convert, I would probably actually be a mystical, poetry-spouting Sufi Muslim, the third wing of Islam that gets almost no play at all. What a fascinating book this was!...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
The farther we progress into the early 2000s, the more convinced I am of how in the future, this period of history will be seen as one where Americans finally started more and more understanding the Middle East in the same semi-complex way they currently understand, say, Europe; because make no mistake, international readers, even though the last ten years have mostly been marked by our glee in blowing sh-t up over there, in private there are more and more Americans each day right now eagerly learning just a little more and a little more about what makes up daily life in the areas once defined by the Arabic, Persian, Ottoman and Moghul empires, with the generalities of such terms as "Farsi" and "Shia" (to cite two random examples) becoming more and more known among the general populace for the first time in US history. (And in fact this is ironically a regular occurrence in American history, for wars to be the catalyst behind our population starting to understand a certain region in a more sophisticated way; look for example at how little most Americans knew about far-east Asia until our involvement in such places as Japan, Korea and Vietnam in the second half of the 20th century, how such basics as Chinese food and karaoke are now sincere staples of American life, when just 50 years ago they seemed impossibly exotic to most.) And thus do we arrive at Marjane Satrapi's thought-provoking and highly entertaining graphic novel Persepolis, which has an interesting history: essentially a memoir of her youth as a loudmouthed, chain-smoking punk-rocker in the midst of Iran's oppressive Islamic Republic years, the story was originally published in the early 2000s as four underground comics in France (where Satrapi now lives); which then became a cult hit in the UK when first translated into English and gathered into two bound books; which then brought about the opportunity to make a popular experimental animated film out of it; which then became a surprise hit in the US and garnered an Oscar nomination; which has just recently finally prompted a one-volume English trade paperback version here, which has quickly in the last year become the book to mention here in America at hipster intellectual cocktail parties, half a decade since the same was true in the EU.
And there's a reason this has become such a huge cult hit in the US, because Satrapi here in Petropolis breaks the entire complicated sequence of events that have happened in Iran in the last thirty years down into a whole series of easily relatable Western-style stories, allowing us to understand the complex, surprisingly diverse population of that country in a way many of us never have before: from the ongoing controversy there among women themselves over "taking the veil" (think of American women debating the relative merits versus embarrassments of chick-lit), to how their decade-long war with Iraq's Saddam Hussein allowed religious conservatives to slowly take over all aspects of the government in the first place (think Bush and the Patriot Act), to the ingeniously subtle ways that rebellious youth display their independence in such an environment anyway (by letting a bit of hair slip out from underneath their veil, by wearing brightly colored socks, by participating in highly codified Austenesque nonverbal flirting sessions in public squares and school stairways). And by Satrapi having the courage to add the details of her own unique, sometimes trainwreck of a life -- her habit of falling in love with gay men, her stint as a homeless gutter-punk in Vienna in the late '80s -- the book never even threatens to devolve into afterschool-special liberal homilies, but instead stands strongly as a solid piece of personal yet political literature, a great example of how powerful graphic novels can be when they're at their best, and why your snotty little slacker friends are always encouraging you to read more of them. Given the events that are going on right this moment in Iran (summer 2009, for those reading this in the future), and how similar they now seem to be in so many Americans' eyes to our own peaceful overthrow of George Bush and his "Christian Taliban" ilk just a year before, now is a better time than ever to tackle Persepolis yourself if you never have; and needless to say, the movie as well is now in my queue over at Netflix, and I will be getting a review of it up here too after I've finally gotten a chance to watch it.
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