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...
Nonfiction
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...
Blood and Money
~ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. By John Carreyrou. Elizabeth Holmes was just 19 when she started her company in 2003. She had a squad of major-league cheerleaders — senior professors at Stanford, angel investors,...
“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...
Predators and Enablers
~ Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow ~ This remarkable book outlines and details the investigative journalism that led to the exposure of decades of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, and his eventual arrest. Ronan Farrow’s name and history are...
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...
Not quite the cat’s meow
~ My Patients Like Treats: Tales from a House-Call Veterinarian, by Duncan MacVean ~ The title and cover picture are both charming. The book itself is largely a disappointment. MacVean may well be a great veterinarian, but alas, he is...
Madness and Desire
~ The Incurable Romantic, by Frank Tallis ~ This is a lovely read, a fascinating collection of case studies by psychologist Frank Tallis about the problematic love relationships of his patients. The stories/cases are interspersed with some light theory on...
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...
A Hundred Billion Neurons
~ Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains. By Helen Thomson ~ In 1985, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a marvellous book: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He describes some of the more unusual cases...
Greed? Envy?
~ The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of The Galleon Hedge Fund. By Anita Raghavan ~ The billionaire of the title is Raj Rajaratnam, the charismatic, Sri-Lanka-born hedge fund CEO whose success was built...
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...
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