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50books_pocA handful of reviews, the shortness of which should not be interpreted as value judgement -- in many cases, they're so short because the books reduced me to flaily incoherence.
Edmundo Paz Soldan, Turing's Delirium
A cool Bolivian cyberpunk/political thriller - I suspect many William Gibson fans will love this - with an acute take on political corruption, and more than a a dash of Kafka. I particularly liked the fact that one key character, investigative cyberjournalist Flavia, merely happens to be (in her "real" life) a teenage schoolgirl.
Caryl Phillips, Cambridge
I previously only knew Phillips's work as an essayist, but this novel is searing. The first half of the book is told in the voice of Emily Cartwright, a young Englishwoman (who Jane Austen would have recognized, if not admired), who is sent by her father to visit his West Indian plantation. It's one of the most extraordinary feats of literary ventriloquism I've come across lately, a masterclass in unreliable narration, even before the second half of the book (narrated by Olumide/David Henderson, the slave re-named "Cambridge") reveals the story under the story.
Sonia Shah, The Body Hunters: testing new drugs on the world's poorest patients
This is a short, pithy and hard-hitting exploration of the issues (medical, moral and political) involved in the boom in research studies using patients in developing countries. It got well-deserved praise from The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal Of Medicine, and I'd say it's a must-read for anyone with an interest in what the Big Pharma companies are doing (which includes those of us who are dependent on their products).
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
That rare rare thing, a novel using second person apostrophe, a story told to an un-named (and clearly increasingly nervous) "you". It handles intense topics with cool irony and impeccable control, as narrator Changez relates his journey from the Princeton student recruited by top firm Underwood Samson to the bearded radical scholar sitting at a cafe table in Lahore talking to an American stranger. I adored it.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night
Clinical psychologist Gobodo-Madikizela relates her prison interviews with Eugene de Kock, one of the commanding officers of apartheid's death squads, in what may be one of the great non-fictional confrontations with the problem of human evil, to be filed next to Hannah Arendt and Gitta Sereny and Ron Rosenbaum. It's a slim, readable book -- Professor Gobodo-Madikizela wears her erudition lightly, giving a clear and concise explanation of Emile Fackenheim's "double move" at one moment, and throwing in a wry reference to The Silence of the Lambs at the next -- with hard and complex intellectual implications about evil and the morality and politics of forgiveness, which she explores with the same clarity. I read this more than a month ago, and I think I've barely begin to process it - I want to re-read it and argue with it and maybe spend a few years thinking about it. It feels like my brain exploded and my ears are still ringing ...
Edmundo Paz Soldan, Turing's Delirium
A cool Bolivian cyberpunk/political thriller - I suspect many William Gibson fans will love this - with an acute take on political corruption, and more than a a dash of Kafka. I particularly liked the fact that one key character, investigative cyberjournalist Flavia, merely happens to be (in her "real" life) a teenage schoolgirl.
Caryl Phillips, Cambridge
I previously only knew Phillips's work as an essayist, but this novel is searing. The first half of the book is told in the voice of Emily Cartwright, a young Englishwoman (who Jane Austen would have recognized, if not admired), who is sent by her father to visit his West Indian plantation. It's one of the most extraordinary feats of literary ventriloquism I've come across lately, a masterclass in unreliable narration, even before the second half of the book (narrated by Olumide/David Henderson, the slave re-named "Cambridge") reveals the story under the story.
Sonia Shah, The Body Hunters: testing new drugs on the world's poorest patients
This is a short, pithy and hard-hitting exploration of the issues (medical, moral and political) involved in the boom in research studies using patients in developing countries. It got well-deserved praise from The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal Of Medicine, and I'd say it's a must-read for anyone with an interest in what the Big Pharma companies are doing (which includes those of us who are dependent on their products).
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
That rare rare thing, a novel using second person apostrophe, a story told to an un-named (and clearly increasingly nervous) "you". It handles intense topics with cool irony and impeccable control, as narrator Changez relates his journey from the Princeton student recruited by top firm Underwood Samson to the bearded radical scholar sitting at a cafe table in Lahore talking to an American stranger. I adored it.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night
Clinical psychologist Gobodo-Madikizela relates her prison interviews with Eugene de Kock, one of the commanding officers of apartheid's death squads, in what may be one of the great non-fictional confrontations with the problem of human evil, to be filed next to Hannah Arendt and Gitta Sereny and Ron Rosenbaum. It's a slim, readable book -- Professor Gobodo-Madikizela wears her erudition lightly, giving a clear and concise explanation of Emile Fackenheim's "double move" at one moment, and throwing in a wry reference to The Silence of the Lambs at the next -- with hard and complex intellectual implications about evil and the morality and politics of forgiveness, which she explores with the same clarity. I read this more than a month ago, and I think I've barely begin to process it - I want to re-read it and argue with it and maybe spend a few years thinking about it. It feels like my brain exploded and my ears are still ringing ...
