Behind the Beautiful Forevers

This exceptional book by Katherine Boo reads like an absorbing, fascinating novel yet is, almost unbelievably, nonfiction.  Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and writer for the New Yorker, lived in Mumbai and delved into the lives of the residents of Annawadi, a small slum beside a lake of sewage, adjacent to a very busy international airport serving Mumbai.

"Everything around us is roses" is how Abdul's younger brother, Mirchi, put it.  "And we're the shit in between."

In an afterward, Boo describes her research, interviewing and filming residents with the help of translators and student interns, for four years, then piecing together this extraordinarily vivid and clear-eyed account of key events in the life of Annawadi, including suicides, a murder, a tragic accident involving horses painted like zebras, and always the crushing power of poverty, inequality and pervasive corruption.

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear.  It was a hectic bazaar, like many other institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu's death was not a profit generating enterprise."

Boo's aim is to understand how globalization and world economics shape the lives of those at the lower end of the economic scale and her insights are penetrating and empathetic.  This is a beautiful book, though heartbreakingly sad.

Zodiac - Neal Stephenson

Finished reading Stephenson's (1988) Zodiac this weekend. It was weird, to say the least, and definitely seemed less mature than other works of his that I've read (not surprising, it's his 2nd book, written before Snow Crash). It's the tale of S.T., a nonviolent ecoterrorist who brings polluting companies to justice by zipping around on his Zodiac (high-powered motored raft) plugging up waste pipes in the Boston Harbor and exposing the offenders to media ridicule. A quick and easy read, not one I'd necessarily recommend.

Book Challenge 2014 stats: 15/65 (23%), 11 books behind schedule. (Although I've now read 2 more books thus far in 2014 than I did in all of 2013!)

Stephenson's Novels

• The Big U (1984)
• Zodiac (1988)
• Snow Crash (1992)
• Interface (1994) 
• The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)
• The Cobweb (1996) 
• Cryptonomicon (1999)
• The Baroque Cycle
• Quicksilver (2003), volume I
• The Confusion (2004), volume II
• The System of the World (2004), volume III
• Anathem (2008)
• The Mongoliad (2010–2012)
• Reamde + Colin's review (2011)

Understanding Power - Noam Chomsky

My book group's most recent selection (at my suggestion) was Chomsky's "Understanding Power." My friend Dan had urged me to read this book many times and I kept putting it off, thinking it would be boring and difficult. Nothing could be farther from the truth! This gripping book, although shocking and disturbing at times, was extremely interesting and readable. It is an edited transcript of Chomsky's various talks, and his style is clear and persuasive. I found this book to be profoundly eye-opening and unsettling regarding American politics and media censorship, and while I felt very disillusioned, it was important for me to have a better understanding of power and oppression in our nation. A must-read for everyone, I think!

Footnotes to the text are available here.

Our Kind of Traitor

Just finished “Our Kind of Traitor” by John le Carre – I thought it was brand new, as I picked it up off the New Books shelf of our Library, but it was actually published in 2010. Well, it was excellent, as usual, but as I have seen in Le Carre’s other recent books, he increasingly indicts major distortions of society caused by massively outsized greed, corruption and international criminality.

In this book, a British academic and his lawyer girlfriend are drawn into helping Dima, a Russian vor or mafia-type, who wishes to defect to Britain to save himself and achieve revenge on a criminal kingpin who has killed Dima’s right-hand man. Dima is “the greatest money launderer in the world” and crusaders within the British Secret Service attempt to use his defection to clean up the financially corrupted British establishment, but they are naturally opposed by those who benefit from the corruption. The novel, intensely readable and absorbing, ends powerfully and unhappily.

le Carre asserts in comments on The Constant Gardener and Our Kind of Traitor that he does not exaggerate the extent of corruption, but if anything, understates it. Interested? Here’s a lengthy and very thoughtful interview, from Democracynow.com in which he discusses these views (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/11/exclusive_british_novelist_john_le_carr)

A quick, thought-provoking read - highly recommended.