Enigmas
~ The Unseen World, by Liz Moore ~ The first few pages of The Unseen World suggest a coming-of-age novel about a girl growing up in unusual circumstances. Ada is 13, living in Boston with her father, a dedicated intellectual...
(Auto)Biography
Foster Care Indictment
~ My Name is Why, by Lemn Sissay ~ This novel is an indictment of the children’s foster care and care services in UK. Sissay tells the story of how he was taken away as a baby from his Ethiopian...
“Champor-champor” culture
~ The Woman who Breathed Two Worlds, by Selina Siak Chin Yoke ~ This novel rather grew on me. At first, the sentences read rather flatly, pedestrian in their construction, and even the local cadences of the non-English educated (or...
Icing on the cake
~ Tender at the Bone, by Ruth Reichl ~ I first came across Ruth Reichl in the early 1990s. We had a small baby and perforce spent much of our time at home, and the New York Times dining section...
Cancer Scientist Blues
~ Jim Allison: Breakthrough ~ The backlash against scientific evidence and skepticism about data-driven consensus has reached alarming proportions, the most obvious instances being the anti-vaccination movement and the refusal to accept climate change. Into this atmosphere comes a wonderful...
Mountain Man Adventurer
~ The Last American Man, by Elizabeth Gilbert ~ This is one of Gilbert’s earlier works, published in 2002, but her writing voice was distinctive already. It is an aptly named book, chronicling the personality of Eustace Conway, born in...
Stranger than Fiction
~ Stealing Green Mangoes, by Sunil Dutta ~ Two brothers, of whom one grows up to be a cop and one to be a criminal. It sounds like a Hindi film script, indeed. But this dichotomy is just one of...
Intimacy in China: Changing with the times
Xinran is a British Chinese journalist who has lived in UK for more than two decades. She has recorded the stories of literally hundreds of women in China, and given voice to the trials and tribulations, sufferings and sorrows of...
Opinionated Pakistani women
~ No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women. By Shahla Haeri ~ Disconcerted by the invisibility of Muslim professional women in academic and cultural literature, Shahla Haeri decided to fill this gap. As she says, they may...
Identity Crisis
~ Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert ~ Emotional tourism has its allure; who among us does not find it fascinating to get a peek into another person’s soul? Emotional tourism by Westerners in the third world is less appealing,...
Is ‘Bombay’ gone forever?
~ Once was Bombay, by Pinki Virani ~ Pinki Virani is outspoken, courageous, opinionated, and forthright. In the preface to Once was Bombay, she lays it on the line. Who killed Bombay? We did. Each of us who thought ourselves...
Nomads in Changing Times
~ Desert Places, by Robyn Davidson ~ Robyn Davidson is an Australian woman with a fondness for and familiarity with camels. Some years ago she travelled the Australian desert with 3 camels, occasionally in company with Aborigine groups, and chronicled...
Recent Comments