In 1992, Hindu fundamentalists in India destroyed a 450-year-old Muslim mosque at Ayodhya, saying that it was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple. The incident sparked religious rioting in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which is where this novel takes place. It tells the story of the Dutta family, part of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh. Muslim fundamentalists use the Ayodhya mosque destruction as an excuse to go on the rampage, including looting of Hindu homes and shops, destruction of Hindu temples, rapes, and disappearances, with the intention of forcing the Hindus to leave Bangladesh permanently. The anti-Hindu violence, intending to turn Bangladesh from mostly Muslim to totaly Muslim, is carried out frequently with the connivance, even active participation, of the police and government.
The book was first published in India, then found its way to Bangladesh, the author's homeland, where the people and government got extremely upset. What ensued were three days of bloody rioting, a nationwide general strike, and the government putting a price on the author's head (like Salman Rushdie)-because of this book. What was more unacceptable for the government was that Nasrin, a medical doctor now living in exile in Sweden, was a Muslim saying sympathetic things about Hindus.
To put it mildly, this book is highly recommended.
Chomsky for Beginners, David Cogswell, Writers and Readers Publishers, Inc, 1996
A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami, Kodansha International, 1989
Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Common Courage Press, 1997
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, Bill Friday, Bantam Books, 1968
The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield, Warner Books, 1993
Black Helicopters II: The Endgame Strategy, Jim Keith, IllumiNet Press, 1997
Commodify Your Dissent, Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (ed.), W.W. Norton, 1997
Ancient Shores, Jack McDevitt, Harper Prism, 1996
Signal to Noise, Carla Sinclair, Harper Edge, 1997
Acid Plaid, Harry Ritchie (ed.), Arcade Publishing, 1996
Carlucci's Heart, Richard Paul Russo, Ace Books, 1997
Crapped Out:How Gambling Ruins the Economy and Destroys Lives, Jennifer Vogel (ed.), Common Courage Press, 1997
They Forged the Signature of God
,Viriato Sencion, Curbstone Press, 1995
Dirty Truths, Michael Parenti, City Lights Books, 1996
Jitterbug, Mike McQuay, Bantam Books, 1984
Jews Without Money, Michael Gold, Bard Books, 1958
This is an introduction to the life and work of "arguably the most important intellectual alive" (New York Times). Noam Chomsky's "day job" is as a linguistics professor at MIT, but he is known worldwide as a political gadlfly and author of more than 30 books. Covering various aspects of politics, history and foreign policy, they explore perspectives rarely, if ever, found in the major media. Chomsky's central message is quite simple: Huge corporations run the world, our country, major media, and both political parties.
Among other assertions in this book: Those who own the country feel that they should run it; mass media is little more than a public relations industry for the rich and powerful; to combat this, people should practice thinking critically and asking questions.
Cogswell does a wonderful job explaining Chomsky in clear language that anyone can understand. Those who have never read Noam Chomsky might be wondering if there's a best place to start; here is an excellent place to start. You won't be disappointed.
Set in present day Japan, this is the story of an average man, part of a small publishing/translating business, who meets, and falls for, a woman with absolutely perfect ears, the sort of ears that make people stop and stare. One day, he is visited by a man with beautiful hands, an aide to a shadowy right-wing politician dying from a golf-ball sized cyst in his brain. With only the help of a 50-year-old photo, the narrator's assignment is to find one particular sheep, a sheep with the shape of a star on its back and very clear eyes. The narrator, never identified by name, doesn't have a choice; find the sheep, or be blacklisted for the rest of his life. The narrator and his girlfriend, the one with the perfect ears, set off from Tokyo and end up in the mountains of Hokkaido, with winter coming.
This is a really interesting, and easy to read, novel that gets increasingly strange as it progresses. By the end, the reader certainly learns a lot about sheep in Japan. For those who like their fiction with a touch of weird, Haruki Murakami is highly recommended, and this book is no exception.
Mad Cow Disease is the informal name for a fatal cow disease called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE. It is transmissible to other cows through the factory farming practice of rendering, or feeding the ground up remains of dead cows, to other cows. People get the disease by eating tainted meat. BSE takes a long time to become noticeable in a cow, so by the time a cow is ready for slaughter, it could be BSE positive and no one would know it. The human version of BSE, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD, kills by creating millions of tiny, spongy holes in a person's brain. It is 100% fatal.
Stauber and Rampton have written a fascinating and very detailed book about the BSE epidemic in England, which killed about a dozen people and forced the killing of thousands and thousands of cows. They also go into detail on the history, looking at a sheep version of BSE called scrapie, and a variant of BSE called kuru, which was decimating a tribe in New Guinea until the practice of cannibalism was stopped.
The authors also have things to say about an American meat industry seemingly more interested in public relations and suppressing critics (like the Oprah Winfrey trial in Texas) than in cutting back on, or stopping, the potentially deadly practice of grinding up dead animals and feeding them to other animals.
To get the undiluted facts instead of diluted nonsense on this urgent issue, this is a Must Read of a book.
This novelization of the Peter Sellers-Leigh Taylor Young film is the story of Harry Fine, Uptight, stressed-out attorney, whose girlfriend, Joyce, really wants to get married. One day he goes to look for his brother, Herbie, who has taken another path through life and is living with a group of local hippies, and meets Nancy, a free-spirited flower child. She doesn't happen to have a place to sleep that night, so Harry reluctantly brings her to his place. He gets really nervous having her around, thinking that if he makes one wrong move, Nancy, Joyce and/or his parents will accuse him of you know what. The next day, while Harry is at work, Nancy bakes him a batch of "magic" brownies. That night, Harry, Joyce and his parents work on wedding preparations at his place, at which time the brownies are sampled. Everyone gets un-uptight real fast.
Wedding day comes, and Harry, having sampled the free-spirited life, leaves Joyce at the altar. He becomes a hippie, with the hair and the clothes, and finds that his house is the new hippie "hangout". Meantime, Joyce and his parents beg him to return to the "real" world.
This is a light, enjoyable sort of story. There are no deep meanings here, but if you have some free time, you could do worse than this book.
For those who have been in a cave for the last couple of years, this book, packaged as a novel, is about an ancient manuscript found in present-day Peru. It describes nine Insights into life itself, ranging from the realization that certain "coincidences" actually happen for a reason, to being able to see and access the energy that is present in everything. It is said that acceptance of these Insights will lead to a spiritual culture on Earth.
The Peruvian government and the Catholic hierarchy, fearing the effects if the Insights become widely known, work to suppress the Manuscript and confiscate all copies. At the same time, some sympathetic priests and, mostly American, scientists work to get the Insights out of the country and in circulation around the world.
My problem with this book isn't so much with the book itself, aside from it being very overwritten and filled with cardboard characters, as it is with books of this type. As something of a New Age skeptic, I have a hard time with any book, no matter how it's packaged, that claims to have The Secret to Spiritual Happiness. If this book has helped some people get through life, that's wonderful. I got this book for fifty cents at a library book sale; personally, that's what it's worth.
Remenber President Bush's New World Order? According to this book, it's alive and well and coming soon to America. Keith says that since the 1960's, all-black helicopters with no markings have been flying over civilian areas at low altitudes, spraying unknown chemicals on the population as part of biowarfare experiments. Also seen all over America are all-white military vehicles, part of a future UN takeover of America. It will lead to a one-world government with mass detention of opponents. Another assertion is that reports of UFO abductions are a coverup for mind control experiments carried out by the intelligence community. Included is the story of FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, intended to assist in the prosecution of financial crimes. Instead, it is busy gathering lifetime financial histories on all American citizens, and has a plan in place to track the monetary transactions in all US bank and credit card accounts.
Believing, or not believing, any of this is very much up to the individual reader. Be that as it may, this is a fascinating and easy to read book that Keith makes hard to dismiss as just the rantings of some paranoid strange person.
This is a group of essays from an irregularly published magazine called The Baffler.
These aren't your average, everyday discussions of what it means to be "hip" or a "rebel". In fact, these are just the opposite. This is a book of scathing criticism of the encroachment of business into nearly every facet of everyday life. Among the subjects covered are: Details and Wired magazines making hip rebel consumers into heroes; corporate fads like reengineering; what Really happens to bands that signs with major labels; packaging a twenty-something first-time author as a serious literary artiste; labeling consumers in their 20s so that marketers will know how to target them for clothes, music, etc; the supposed death of the city as institution due to the cyber-revolution; edge cities, towns just outside major cities that are not yet cities themselves, but are more than suburbs; and Orange County, California, the wealthy, high-class myth and the fiscally bankrupt reality.
I really loved this book. It's easy to read, it pulls no punches, and it should give marketers and admen all over America some sleepless nights. When you can find it on the newsstand,The Baffler, the magazine, is equally highly recommended.
This is the science fiction story of a North Dakota wheat farmer, who, one day, finds a triangular piece of metal sticking out of the ground. He kepps digging, and digging, and finds a 45-foot yacht buried in his wheat field. It's in good enough condition to look like it was buried last week, but has actually been there a lot longer, and is made of materials unknown to human science.
The area quickly becomes a full-fledged media spectacle. After further digging, a large roundhouse, that glows at night, is unearthed. Inside are portals to several other worlds, one of which is christened Eden. By this time, the area, which is on Indian land, has become a magnet for religious fundamentalists, thrill seekers, legitimate scientists, and UFO believers. Several unsuccessful attempts are made by private companies to buy the site. Meantime, in the rest of the world, financial markets are in free fall, fearing new technologies from the site that will give new meaning to the words "lifetime guarantee". At the end is an attempt by the government to unilaterally seize the site, intending to limit, or deny, all further access.
This is a really interesting and easy to read story that works from start to finish. It's very much grounded in reality, and is an all around great story.
Set in present-day San Francisco, this is the story of Jim Knight, stressed-out features editor at Signal, the extremely hip multimedia magazine. One night, baecause his car is in the shop, he gets a ride home from a bunch of interns at a zine in the same building as Signal. One of them, Kat Astura, accidentally finds a gambling web site on Jim's system called El Tropical. Thinking that it's not for real, she racks up what she thinks is a $200,000 virtual debt. Little do either of them know, but the debt is real, and the mob, the owners of the web site, come around looking for the money now.
The two are kidnapped and taken to El Tropical's headquarters, a trailer park outside of Reno, by a rather motley group of gangsters. Meantime, plans are made to get the money from Jim and Kat, money which neither of them has, by any means necessary.
This is a really good novel of contemporary San Franciscomultimedia culture written by someone who has been there; it's a pretty good suspense novel, too.
This is a collection of contemporary fiction and poetry from the country of Scotland.
Perhaps the most familiar name, to American readers, on the contents page, is Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting. He contributes a story, written in actual Scottish dialect, about a man who wants nothing more than to stay home and watch the weekend football match on TV. His wife is pestering him to take her and their children out to lunch at a local pub. While there, she overindulges with the alcohol; on their way back, they pass the local train station. She decides to take a walk on the track, with the train coming. She is struck, and grievously injured, by the train, losing both legs. An ambulance comes, and gets them all to the local hospital, where the biggest concern of the husband, the narrator of the story, is the location of the nearest TV so he can watch the weekend football match.
Other stories are about a very strange job interview and burning an effigy of Elvis Presley.
This is a really enjoyable anthology from the new literary hot spot. It's full of gritty, beer-soaked writing, and is well worth reading.
This is a science fiction story set in a near-future San Francisco divided into separate walled-off sections, some of which even the police ignore. Lt. Frank Carlucci looks into the disappearance of a friend of his daughter, he soon runs into this mysterious organization called Cancer Cell.It does cutting edge medical research and gives terminally ill patients a chance at whatever treatments are available for their disease, as long as they agree to be guinea pigs for any other drugs that need testing.
Carlucci also meets Cage, a doctor at a storefront clinic that specializes in treating the poor and destitute. Cage begins to see signs of a new, very contagious disease coming out of the Core, a part of the city for which the term "no man's land" was coined. It starts off looking like the flu, but after a couple of weeks, it turns virulent, and has a 100% fatality rate. This leads to a not-very-successful federal quarantine of the Core, in the hope that the disease will burn itself out without spreading elsewhere.
This is a tough, down and dirty story that will appeal to fans of police novels as well as science fiction fans. It's an excellent piece of writing, and I really enjoyed it.
"Gambling is bad" is an easy thing to say; this book goes into lots of detail as to why gambling is bad, not just for the individual, but for society in general.
It usually starts with the state legislature. Any untapped source of revenue is looked at with great anticipation in these days of economic belt-tightening. Revenue from lotteries or casinos is usually intended, in the beginning, for a worthy cause like education or the environment. The money isn't an extra windfall for that department, it's money that the legislature can take from that department and use elsewhere. Usually, the money is quietly redirected, after a couple of years into the state's general fund.
In economically depressed areas, casinos and riverboat gambling promise jobs and tourists and growth in the local economy. For every successful casino like Foxwoods in Connecticut, there is a riverboat casino somewhere in the Midwest where the only thing that has grown up around it is a parking lot, assuming that it is still open.
Studies have shown that lotteries are simply another way of redistributing money from the poor to the rich; those in lower-class areas play the lottery more than those in upper-class areas.
Anyone who has ever bet at a casino or played Lotto needs to read this book.
This book takes place mostly at a seminary in the Dominican Republic. It's about three seminary studentssuffering from church-state oppression, who, quietly, find themselves part of the active political opposition. It's also about the president of the country, Dr. Ramos, who remains in power through tyranny and manipulation, and who, purely on grounds of mental capacity, should have stepped down several years ago. It is also the story of an ex-seminarian who makes himself indispensable to Dr. Ramos with the intention of bringing him down.
To American readers, raised on sex, violence, and car chases, this book might seem pretty tame and boring. It does take some work on the part of the reader, but it's actually much better than that.
When first published in the Dominican Republic, the country's president went on national TV to publicly denounce the book. It then went on to become the best-selling book in the history of the Dominican Republic. It's that good, that realistic, and that much worth reading.
Here is a group of essays on various aspects of political life from a long-time author, lecturer, and college professor.
Among the subjects covered in this book: term limits for politicians sounds like a great idea, but it would leave Congress totally (instead of mostly, as at present) in the hands of corporate lobbyists who are not under any sort of term limits. Conservatives have created a myth that the media is full of liberals to force the owners to move their media outlets more and more to the conservative side. The American people don't know about the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, for example, because the news media intentionally doesn't report it. Freedom of speech in theory, and freedom of speech in reality, especially for progressives, are two very different things.
Parenti also includes a couple of essays on his personal life, including dealings with the news media that come very close to censorship, and being branded an academic troublemaker because, as a visiting professor at one school, he took part in some anti-Vietnam war demonstrations.
This is a first-class gem of a book. It's thought provoking, easy to read, and is strongly recommended.
This science fiction story takes place in 2155, on an earth run by an Arab dictator with the power of life and death over everyone. He rules by terror, with the help of a very contagious and fatal disease called Jitterbug, which has been used before and has rendered 90 percent of the earth uninhabitable. New Orleans, one of the few pockets of survivors left, is where this novel takes place.
It's the story of Olson, a drifter from the Southwest, who enters the city assuming the identity of a Junex (junior Executive) transferring from Dallas. Earth has become a place where amoral executives battle for what power is left, while everyone else battles to survive. Olson is accompanied by Gret, a sort of genetically engineered human sex machine who knows her way around the corridors of power.
Together they battle for control of the local branch of the Light of the World (LOW) Corporation, the instrument through which the world is controlled, when their protector, the current head of LOW New Orleans, dies under mysterious circumstances.
This one is surprisingly good. Given the year it was published, it is very plausible. The social speculation is right on target, the characters are real people, and it's an all around interesting read.
This is a partly autobiographical novel of life in the tenements of New York's Lower East Side in the early part of this century. It's a day-in-the-life tale of thieves, gangsters, and honest folks just trying to get by in a new country. Gold's father, whose desire to run his own business is greater than his ability to actually run the business, is injured at work and confined to bed for a year. Different ethnic groups congregate on different city blocks; finding someone from a different block on "your" street is taken very seriously by the children and adolescents. Feeling that their worship isn't complete without a rabbi from the old country, the neighborhood Orthodox Jews, very poor themselves, pay the sea passage for a young rabbi to come to America. He turns out to be a jerk, and, at the first opportunity, splits for a larger congregation.
Gold does a wonderful job at putting the reader right in the middle of the sights, smells and sounds of people who may be materially poor, but very rich emotionally. This has been called the urban version of John Steinbeck's great agricultural protest novel,The Grapes of Wrath. This book is that good. It's a very passionate piece of writing, and is highly recommended.
