Human Cargo

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees
By Caroline Moorhead

This book is an intimate look at what it means to be a refugee. Caroline Moorhead shares the stories of dozens of refugees around the world. Their stories are horrific and moving. They have faced persecution, torture, and loss that are unfathomable to those of us lucky enough to be born into privilege.

What I found most compelling about this book is Moorhead’s discussion of immigration policies in western countries, which isn’t something that I’ve ever really given much thought to. The book raises some very tough issues around the morality of exclusionary immigration policies. She explores the ways in which our ideas of national identity are predicated on exclusion – on keeping “others” out. Moorhead certainly doesn’t offer any easy answers, because of course there aren’t any. The issues are complex and difficult – what obligations do we have to intervene in civil wars and domestic conflicts? What obligations do we have to people who are displaced by civil wars and domestic conflicts? How can we repair the legacy of destruction that is being perpetuated in refugee and displaced persons camps?

I really enjoyed this book and it raises some issues that I think we all need to give some thought to. On a personal note, this book planted the seed of an idea that I think may develop into a topic for my master’s thesis.

Honeymoon in Purdah

Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey
By Alison Wearing

Honeymoon in Purdah is the sort of book that fills you with wanderlust. I have never had any particular desire to visit Iran, but this book paints such a vivid picture of the country and its people that I might almost change my mind. Alison Wearing is a Canadian living in Montreal. She and her roommate decide to travel to Iran posing as a young couple on their honeymoon. The book is a travel journal of her experiences and encounters as a western woman traveling in Iran. She wears a chador as required by the Muslim faith as she travels across the country, and her reflections on the symbolism of that experience for her as a woman are very interesting.

The Iranian people that she meets on her journey show her unbelievable kindness and generosity and welcome her into their homes. The book offers a compelling look at life in contemporary Iran and the ways in which its people live within the complicated intersection of religion, culture and politics.

Red Azalea

Red Azalea
By Anchee Min

This is an extraordinary book. I'd never heard of it and to be honest I picked it out at the library because it's a small paperback and was the only book on the shelf I was standing next to that would fit in my bag.

It is the story of the author’s childhood in China under the Maoist regime. I had to keep reminding myself that it’s an autobiography because it reads like a novel. Min’s story is about growing up, but this universal and familiar human experience is set in a time and place that for most readers is simply unimaginable. This is a book that I won’t soon forget and I highly recommend it.

Middlesex

Middlesex
By Jeffrey Eugenides

I never really had any interest in reading this book, despite the fact that I didn’t know anything about it. I found the cover a bit blah, so it had never appealed to me visually. Also, for some reason the title made me think that the book would be about a British general. I could not have been more wrong.

In fact, this is a book about a young hermaphrodite whose childhood is spent as a young girl and who lives as a man after she becomes a teenager. The story reaches back to the main character’s grandparents, who, unbeknownst to her/him, are in fact brother and sister.

This book is strangely captivating and filled with unexpectedly poignant moments.

A Region in Turmoil

A Region in Turmoil: South Asian Conflicts Since 1947
By Rob Johnson

This book looks at the trends of military, political, ethnic and religious conflict in South Asia, with an emphasis on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Myanmar (Burma) and Nepal. It is part of the “Contemporary Worlds” series that focuses on contemporary geo-political forces. The book was published in August of 2005, so it is fairly up-to-date in terms of world events. I found it to be an engaging read and I learned a great deal about a region that I didn’t have much prior knowledge of. Johnson provides a great overview and uses enough detail to make his topic interesting, but without overwhelming the reader with trivia. I definitely recommend this to anyone who has an interest in the recent history of this part of the world.

Also, and this is a complete aside, I really loved the font that this book was published in. I’ve always found it strange that some books actually tell you what font or type-face they used – I just never thought anyone actually cared. Until I saw this font, and let me tell you – I am in love. It’s a British book, so it’s obviously some kind of delightful British font. I bet it has a sexy British-sounding name, too. I guess I’ll never know…

Gilead

Gilead
By Marilynne Robinson

This novel is written in the form of a letter from a dying man to his young son. In the “letter” – which is a father’s legacy to his son – the Reverend John Ames reflects on his own life, his family history and his faith. This book is beautifully written and very moving. Although the main character’s faith is a very central element in the novel, I didn’t find it at all alienating despite the fact that I am not even slightly religious.

I highly recommend this book – and in fact I already passed my copy along to my parents to read because I think they’ll both really enjoy it. Plus, I’m still trying to make up for having loaned my father “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”….

Thanks to Mapletree7 http://mapletree7.blogspot.com/gspot.com/ for her Alt.list recommendations, which prompted me to read this book.

Virtual War

Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
By Michael Ignatieff

In this book Michael Ignatieff looks at the implications of modern warfare. With reference to Kosovo, which he identifies as the first “virtual war”, he writes about the consequences of waging a war in which we are more voyeurs than combatants. He also looks at the ways in which we justify warfare and the hypocrisy, albeit necessary, of killing in the name of protecting human rights.

One of the parts of Virtual War that I found particularly interesting was Ignatieff’s writing about Louise Arbour in her capacity as the chief prosecutor of the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. I found his discussions with her around the indictment of Milosevic to be fascinating, particularly because I had the pleasure of hearing her speak about the same subject when she visited the University of Victoria Faculty of Law while I was student there.

I found this book to be philosophically interesting and thought provoking.

The Weekend Man

The Weekend Man
By Richard B. Wright

The best thing I can say about this book is that Wright’s characters are marvelously textured and he does an amazing job of giving the reader tiny glimpses at them in a way that makes each character seem interesting and flawed and real. That said, I found the main character kind of pathetic. I know that he was supposed to be, but by the time I put the book down I felt kind of exhausted and hopeless about my own life. Definitely not an uplifting read.

While I didn’t love the Weekend Man, I did find Wright’s writing style appealing, so I think I’ll try another of his books – perhaps I’ll read Clara Callan, which won both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award.

Allah's Mountains

Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya
By Sebastian Smith

Before I picked up this book I knew absolutely nothing about the conflict in Chechnya. Allah’s Mountains provides both a rich historical context and a detailed first-person account of the Russian response to Chechnya’s declaration of independence in 1991. It is as educational as a historical text, but as readable as a novel.

Smith is a journalist and was one of few foreign journalists in Chechnya during the First (1994-1996) Chechen War. His account of the conflict is made more powerful because he intersperses descriptions of political and military events with intensely personal vignettes of his experiences in Chechnya.

Allah’s Mountains is exactly the kind of book I like best. I found Smith’s writing style completely engaging and I also gained some understanding of what’s been going on in the Caucus over the past few decades. I think that we in North America are reluctant to look too closely at these kinds of disputes (I’m thinking also of the former Yugoslavia). It seems that we tend to write them off as internal religious or ethnic conflicts that are none of our business. I find our willful blindness about what’s really happening in other parts of the world to be terrifying. We live in a time where information can be transmitted half a world away in an instant, yet we are still ignorant about so much of what happens in the world.

Summer Crossing

Summer Crossing
By Truman Capote

I was a bit puzzled when I came across this book at the library last week because I’d never heard of it. Once I picked it up, I realized why. This novel was published posthumously after a box of Capote’s things were put up for auction at Sotheby’s in 2004 – twenty years after Capote’s death.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because I love Capote’s writing style, but it definitely had an unfinished feel about it. Which makes sense, obviously, since he never intended for it to be published in its present form. If you like Capote already you’ll enjoy Summer Crossing, but if you are a Capote-virgin, I’d recommend starting with something else (maybe In Cold Blood or Breakfast at Tiffany's).

Barney's Version

Barney’s Version
By Mordecai Richler

First a confession: this is the first Mordecai Richler book I’ve ever read (unless you count Jacob Two-two Meets the Hooded Fang, which I don’t). I know – bad Canadian. I’m not sure how I managed to get through high school AND an Honours English degree without ever having the Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz show up on a syllabus, but somehow I did.

First impressions: I HATE the cover of this book. I actually find it repellent. I opened this book not really expecting that I’d like it, but I was very pleasantly surprised and read the entire thing in two sittings.

Barney’s Version is a mockobiography – fiction written in the style of an autobiography, complete with an “Afterword” written by the main character’s fictional son. I found myself grudgingly liking Barney, the main character, by the end of the book in spite of myself. He possessed few (if any!) redeeming qualities, yet the confessional nature of the book detailed his mistakes, weaknesses and regrets in a way that humanized him for me.

What I liked about this book was that Richler cleverly demonstrated that there is no such thing as “truth”, as life is always obscured and coloured by our memories and perceptions. I highly recommend this book and I will definitely make a point of picking up some of Richler’s other works the next time I’m at the library.

Night

Night
By Elie Wiesel

See Oprah? I haven’t held a grudge about Gap Creek.

It seems a bit improper to be making a joke in a post about this book, but since I’m one of those people with the unfortunate habit of laughing or giggling when it’s REALLY inappropriate, I suppose it’s fitting.

I had actually never heard of this book until I was at Chapters the other night with my friend Hilary. She decided to buy this book by Douglas Coupland



– which I supported because I really want to read it too. Then we saw the display for Night, which she’d heard was very good. She talked me into buying it so that we could trade after we’d read them. I never need much convincing to buy a book, so I agreed.

This is a deceptively slim volume, translated from a book originally written in Yiddish. It is an autobiographical recounting of the author’s experience as a young teenager when he and his family were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp. The Holocaust is a tragedy of such enormity that it’s hard to get my head around. It just seems so impossible that people could have committed such acts of atrocity against one another. What makes the legacy of the Holocaust so terrifying is not the idea that people have the capacity for senseless hatred and cruelty, but that so many people were complicit in this. How can we ever make sense of that?

The Night looks at the Holocaust in the context of its impact on a single life. The author’s style is sparse but immensely powerful. Before his experience at Auschwitz – and the labour camps after that – the author was very religious. What I found most compelling about this book was the author’s struggle to reconcile his faith with his experiences. The horror of the camps made it impossible for him to continue to believe as he had before:

I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do
so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no
longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned
that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.
And I nibbled on my crust of bread.
Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening.

The book’s message transcends religion and speaks to our faith in humanity: silence is unacceptable. We are each of us complicit when we do nothing when others are persecuted. This isn’t a pleasant book, and it shouldn’t be. I wasn’t even born when the Holocaust happened, but I nonetheless felt guilt reading this book. I think that we – all of us – ought to feel a collective guilt and shame that this was ever allowed to happen to even one person, let alone millions. For me this is what makes this book important and I’m glad that it is enjoying a resurgence in popularity nearly fifty years after it was first published. It’s dangerous for us to think of the Holocaust as something that happened in another time and place and could never happen again.

Night contains a very important message that we must never let ourselves forget.

Fair Trade For All

Fair Trade For All: How Trade Can Promote Development
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton

This book looks at economic and trade policy aimed at promoting development within the least developed countries in the context of the World Trade Organization. To be completely honest, most of the book was over my head. At best, I have a rudimentary understanding of economics.

Still, the premise of the book was interesting. It was primarily a critique of the existing assumptions and rules that govern trade agreement negotiations between WTO countries. The authors argue that most of the economic assumptions that underlie these negotiations simply don't hold true for developing countries. Large developed countries, like the US, consistently negotiate trade agreements with less developed countries that negatively impact the potential for development in those countries. The authors argue that we need re-evaluate the popular notion that trade liberalization is the best and only recipe for development.

The authors posit a new form of trade agreement between developed and developing countries, which they call the Market Access Proposal. Essentially, the proposal is as follows:

All WTO members could commit themselves to providing free market access in all
goods to developing countries poorer and smaller than themselves. (94)

The idea is that market access is distributed progressively based on criteria like GDP and population. As I understand it, this model would look like a big pyramid with the US at the top providing unrestricted access to its markets to all countries below it.

As I said, much of this book was beyond me, but I did take away a few things from it. I have a better understanding of the complexity of farm subsidies. Living in southwestern Ontario, this is an issue that is often in the news, but one that I've never really understood. I certainly wouldn't claim to understand it now, but I have a better appreciation for why it is such a contentious issue. When developed countries like Canada, the US or the EU subsidize agriculture it drives down prices in those markets that developing countries are most likely to have a competitive advantage in, which obviously is to the detriment of developing countries.

Herein lies the tension - should we do just what's best for Canada? For our farmers and our agricultural industry? Or do we need to broaden the scope of the application of principles of fairness and equality and think globally rather than just nationally? Fair Trade For All makes the point that political globalization has not kept up with economic globalization and that as a result we are still adhering to a system of international trade negotiation based upon political and economic power rather than upon principle and fairness.

Interesting topic, but not exactly accessible for those of us without a background in economics or international trade. The writing was extremely dry, and I think that if the authors wanted to appeal to a wider audience they should have used some real-life examples (ie. described the impacts of non-tariff barriers) to make the subject more relatable.