Reviews in Brief
- East, P.D. Magnolia Jungle. Autobiography of a progressive southern editor. A joy to read; it sheds lights on white poverty along with racial issues of the day, and what it took for the man to write biting satire against segregation
- Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. The two most popular novels by the author, 1984, and Animal Farm, are also his worst. Orwell never had much writing talent but he did produce at least two good books. Homage to Catalonia is one of them. A clear eyed account of the leftist politics that botched the war, it is widely considered to be among the best books on Spanish civil war. The other good book is Burmese Days, a complex atmospheric novel about colonialism by someone with ambivalent feelings towards colonialism.
- French, Patrick. The world is what it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. A perfect biography of an imperfect man.
- Griffin, John. Black like me. A simply but powerfully told story of a white journalist who changed his appearance to live like a black man in the Jim Crow era South.
- Venkatesh, Sudhir. Gang leader for a day. A sociologist catalogs the ghettos and gangs of Chicago from inside out. Somewhat insightful, but a tad tedious
- Rodenbeck, Max. Cairo: The City Victorious. An erudite, warm, and beautiful recounting of the history and present of Cairo (al-Qahira/The Victorious).
- Lewis, Anthony. Gideon’s Trumpet This superb book by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist captures the historic sixth amendment case, Gideon Vs Wainwright/Cochran.
- Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro. Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth. Snippets from the LRB review:. “A poll conducted by Time/CNN on the estate tax issue in 2000 revealed that 39 per cent of Americans believe that they are either in the wealthiest 1 per cent or will be there ‘soon’.”
“Norquist…”I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus per cent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who play the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, ‘Yes, well, that’s only 2 per cent,’ or, as people get richer, 5 per cent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that’s the morality of the Holocaust. ‘Well, it’s only a small percentage,’ you know. ‘I mean, it’s not you, it’s somebody else.’”
- Dickinson, Charles. With or Without. A collection of exquisite distinctly American short stories that carry the waft of Cheever and O’Henry. Dickinson is an author of great merit.
- Forester, E.M.. 1924. A Passage to India. An elegantly written novel about the conflict between the rulers and the ruled, and the impossibility of friendship between the two. While the novel occasionally deals in cliches, Forester’s perspicacity and humanity provides a calming influence. A significant achievement for its time and an important book for readers of English literature.
- Nasr, Vali. 2006. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam will Shape the Future. W.W. Norton & Company. – A useful introduction for people who don’t know anything about the history between Shias and Sunnis. Otherwise a tedious compilation of relatively obvious information put forth in uneven style.
