Aram’s book plunged
me into a surreal landscape that felt weirdly normal—a quality familiar to me
from dreams.
It’s set in a neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan, during the civil
war of the mid-90s, but this isn’t like any war I’ve seen depicted: there are no
armies with clashing interests.
No one knows who’s fighting or why. This war
isn’t about anything, it’s just there, meaningless and ubiquitous, like
rush hour traffic or pollution, something to get through as you go about your everyday
life, be it collecting scorpions, having sex with the neighbor’s wife, creating
beauty with calligraphy, whatever… Often I found myself shedding tears without
knowing why. I wasn’t in Kabul during that war, but after this novel, I felt
like I had been.
In this novel about peace in a time of war, debut author Jamaluddin Aram masterfully breathes life into the colourful characters of the town of Wazirabad, in early 1990s Kabul, Afghanistan.
It is the early 1990s, in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Russian occupation has ended, and civil war has broken out, but life roars on in full force in the working-class town of Wazirabad.
A rash of burglaries has stolen people’s sleep. Fifteen-year-old Aziz awakens from a dark dream that prompts him to plant shards of glass along the wall surrounding his house to protect his family against theft. Aziz’s sister,…
From Buddha to Alan
Watts, philosophers and sages have been delivering pronouncements on how to
achieve happiness—but what does science say about their prescriptions? That’s the
question Haidt tackles and you know what?
It turns out there’s something to the
ancient wisdoms—not everything but something. In reaching this
conclusion, Haidt takes us through a brilliant description of how the brain
works, how the mind works, and how we humans work when we’re operating
socially.
These subjects have been among my own most intense preoccupations in
recent years and in The Happiness Hypothesis, I kept running across
ideas I’d been groping to formulate, illuminated by Haidt with wonderful
clarity.
In his widely praised book, award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines the world's philosophical wisdom through the lens of psychological science, showing how a deeper understanding of enduring maxims-like Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or What doesn't kill you makes you stronger-can enrich and even transform our lives.
On the surface, Blood Sugar seems like
a suspense thriller told in workman-like prose without literary pretensions: it
just sets forth what happened next and next and next, hooking you with suspense
that keeps tightening until your fingers are sore from gripping the book.
Many
might finish the novel and see nothing more. I however saw Rotschild doing here
what Nabokov did in Lolita. The key lies in the fact that the story is
told in first person by an unreliable narrator. After you’ve finished it, you find yourself pondering what really
happened and who the various characters really are—because, remember, you don’t
know anything about any of them except through the eyes of that unreliable
first-person telling the story.
She's accused of four murders. She's only guilty of three...
When Ruby was a child growing up in Miami, she saw a boy from her school struggling against the ocean waves while his parents were preoccupied. Instead of helping him, Ruby dove under the water and held his ankle down until he drowned. She waited to feel guilty for it, but she never did.
And, as Ruby will argue in her senior thesis while studying psychology at Yale, guilt is sort of like eating ice cream while on a diet - if you're already feeling bad, why not eat the…
This is a history
of the world from the Big Bang to right now. Like every world history, it tells
the story of how we got to where we are today. Unlike most such histories,
however, the “we” at the center of the narrative is all of us. Five hundred
centuries ago, humans were countless separate bands of hunter-gathers roaming
an inexhaustible wilderness; now we’re one single intertangled spaghetti of
human lives blanketing the entire planet. How did we get to this global singularity and
given our trajectory, where might we go from here?
The Invention of Yesterday takes you
from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age in an epic journey of a species awakening
into consciousness of itself as a single whole.
