en-US Thu, 15 Feb 2024 15:28:23 -0800 60 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]> 960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X Ben 0 currently-reading 4.58 1985
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Ben
average rating: 4.58
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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]]> 126583 251 John O'Hara 0375719202 Ben 4 3.82 1934
author: John O'Hara
name: Ben
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1934
rating: 4
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]]> 4934
This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel.]]> 796 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0374528373 Ben 5 4.38 1879
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Ben
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1879
rating: 5
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]]> 320 One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of a mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.]]> 417 Gabriel García Márquez Ben 5 4.10 1967
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Ben
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2011/08/29
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]]> 30474 The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels' revolutionary 1848 summons to the working classes, is one of the most influential political theories ever formulated. After four years of collaboration, the authors produced this incisive account of their idea of Communism, in which they envisage a society without classes, private property, or a state. They argue that increasing exploitation of industrial workers will eventually lead to a revolution in which capitalism is overthrown. Their vision transformed the world irrevocably, and remains relevant as a depiction of global capitalism today.]]> 288 Karl Marx 0140447571 Ben 4 3.70 1848
author: Karl Marx
name: Ben
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1848
rating: 4
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]]> 80470 338 Karl Marx 0872202186 Ben 4 3.96 1977
author: Karl Marx
name: Ben
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1977
rating: 4
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]]> 62698 578 Noam Chomsky 0745315305 Ben 3 4.20 1982
author: Noam Chomsky
name: Ben
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1982
rating: 3
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]]> 198373 * Examines changes in international politics and approaches to global terrorism following the US-led military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq
* Extensively revised facts and figures

The seventh edition of this perennial stalwart of the Kumarian Press list continues the discussion of the “new American hegemony” and the “war on terror” that began with the previous edition. In particular, Isbister addresses changes in international politics and the impact on the global order of the US-led military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The author also focuses on major initiatives, such as the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, to confront the issue of world poverty. As with all editions of this vibrant text, Isbister writes with clarity and passion, not only about failed promises, but about hope, human potential, and the belief that a just and equitable world system is attainable.]]> 272 John Isbister 1565492161 Ben 4 3.85
author: John Isbister
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average rating: 3.85
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]]> 564471 463 Alan Whiteside 1403997683 Ben 4 3.86 2002
author: Alan Whiteside
name: Ben
average rating: 3.86
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rating: 4
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]]> 17690
In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproduces the distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel as full of energy and power as when it was first written.]]> 255 Franz Kafka Ben 5 3.99 1925
author: Franz Kafka
name: Ben
average rating: 3.99
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rating: 5
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]]> 1308449
The Liberal Virus examines the ways in which the American model is being imposed on the world, and outlines its economic and political consequences. It shows how both citizenship and class consciousness are diluted in "low-intensity democracy" and argues instead for democratization as an ongoing process--of fundamental importance for human progress--rather than a fixed constitutional formula designed to support the logic of capital accumulation.

In a panoramic overview, Amin examines the objectives and outcomes of American policy in the different regions of the world. He concludes by outlining the challenges faced by those resisting the American project today: redefining European liberalism on the basis of a new compromise between capital and labor, re-establishing solidarity among the people of the South, and reconstructing an internationalism that serves the interests of regions that are currently divided against each other.]]> 144 Samir Amin 1583671072 Ben 3 3.79 2004
author: Samir Amin
name: Ben
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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]]> 10234 479 Paul Farmer 1567513441 Ben 3 4.24 1999
author: Paul Farmer
name: Ben
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1999
rating: 3
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]]> 457264 746 Simone de Beauvoir 0679724516 Ben 4 4.17 1949
author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Ben
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1949
rating: 4
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]]> 53981 360 Karl Polanyi 080705643X Ben 5 4.22 1944
author: Karl Polanyi
name: Ben
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1944
rating: 5
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]]> 46756 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385721677.
Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.]]> 389 Margaret Atwood Ben 4 4.00 2003
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Ben
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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]]> 78433 The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience.

It opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it is destined to become a classic.]]> 641 Margaret Atwood Ben 4 3.96 2000
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Ben
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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]]> 183040
In his analyses of ‘fictitious capital’ and ‘uneven geographical development’ Harvey takes the reader step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with Marx’s controversial argument concerning the falling rate of profit, moving through crises of credit and finance, and closing with a timely analysis geopolitical and geographical considerations.]]> 512 David Harvey 1844670953 Ben 5 4.20 1982
author: David Harvey
name: Ben
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1982
rating: 5
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]]> 7082 BLADE RUNNER. Originally published in 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains a masterpiece ahead of its time, a prescient rendering of a dark future.]]> 244 Philip K. Dick Ben 5 4.08 1968
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Ben
average rating: 4.08
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rating: 5
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]]> 647 No Logo employs journalistic savvy and personal testament to detail the insidious practices and far-reaching effects of corporate marketing—and the powerful potential of a growing activist sect that will surely alter the course of the 21st century. First published before the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, this is an infuriating, inspiring, and altogether pioneering work of cultural criticism that investigates money, marketing, and the anti-corporate movement.

As global corporations compete for the hearts and wallets of consumers who not only buy their products but willingly advertise them from head to toe—witness today's schoolbooks, superstores, sporting arenas, and brand-name synergy—a new generation has begun to battle consumerism with its own best weapons. In this provocative, well-written study, a front-line report on that battle, we learn how the Nike swoosh has changed from an athletic status-symbol to a metaphor for sweatshop labor, how teenaged McDonald's workers are risking their jobs to join the Teamsters, and how "culture jammers" utilize spray paint, computer-hacking acumen, and anti-propagandist wordplay to undercut the slogans and meanings of billboard ads (as in "Joe Chemo" for "Joe Camel").

No Logo will challenge and enlighten students of sociology, economics, popular culture, international affairs, and marketing.

"This book is not another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable." —Naomi Klein, from her Introduction]]> 528 Naomi Klein 0312421435 Ben 3 3.90 2000
author: Naomi Klein
name: Ben
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2000
rating: 3
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]]> 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. Just as Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”

Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing — the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit — that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Ben 4 4.11 1969
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Ben
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 4
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]]> 11691
From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.

Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.

No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness.

Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties.

Note: One of multiple covers for ISBN 9780375706868.]]> 463 Orhan Pamuk Ben 5 3.61 2002
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Ben
average rating: 3.61
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rating: 5
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]]> 7144 671 Fyodor Dostoevsky Ben 5 4.27 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Ben
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1866
rating: 5
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]]> 6192 220 J.M. Coetzee 0143036378 Ben 5 3.86 1999
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Ben
average rating: 3.86
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rating: 5
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]]> 233194

Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the gaze of experts.]]> 320 Arturo Escobar 0691001022 Ben 5 4.04 1994
author: Arturo Escobar
name: Ben
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1994
rating: 5
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]]> 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919–2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Ben 4 3.81 1951
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Ben
average rating: 3.81
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]]> 4796
The Nobel Committee, in awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature, stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American."]]> 291 John Steinbeck 0143039482 Ben 4 4.01 1961
author: John Steinbeck
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average rating: 4.01
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]]> 5308
A story of classic simplicity, based on a Mexican folk tale, The Pearl explores the secrets of man’s nature, greed, the darkest depths of evil, and the luminous possibilities of love.]]> 96 John Steinbeck 0142000698 Ben 4 3.56 1947
author: John Steinbeck
name: Ben
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1947
rating: 4
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]]> 4406
Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.]]> 601 John Steinbeck 0142000655 Ben 4 4.44 1952
author: John Steinbeck
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average rating: 4.44
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]]> 890 “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.”

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.

While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing Of Mice and Men, creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual's existence meaningful.

A unique perspective on life's hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.]]> 107 John Steinbeck 0142000671 Ben 5 3.89 1937
author: John Steinbeck
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]]> 4395 The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

First published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is perhaps the most American of American Classics.]]> 455 John Steinbeck Ben 5 3.89 1939
author: John Steinbeck
name: Ben
average rating: 3.89
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]]> 53925
~publisher's web site]]> 568 Mario Vargas Llosa 0571139612 Ben 2 4.25 1981
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: Ben
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1981
rating: 2
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]]> 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X Ben 1 4.34 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Ben
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 1
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]]> 4982 224 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Ben 5 4.16 1959
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Ben
average rating: 4.16
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rating: 5
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]]> 9590 Slaughterhouse-Five of Vonnegut's canon in its prominence and influence, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) presents Eliot Rosewater, an itinerant, semi-crazed millionaire wandering the country in search of heritage and philanthropic outcome, introducing the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout to the world and Vonnegut to the collegiate audience which would soon make him a cult writer.

Trout, modeled according to Vonnegut on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (with whom Vonnegut had an occasional relationship) is a desperate, impoverished but visionary hack writer who functions for Eliot Rosewater as both conscience and horrid example. Rosewater, seeking to put his inheritance to some meaningful use (his father was an entrepreneur), tries to do good within the context of almost illimitable cynicism and corruption.

It is in this novel that Rosewater wanders into a science fiction conference--an actual annual event in Milford, Pennsylvania--and at the motel delivers his famous monologue evoked by science fiction writers and critics for almost half a century: "None of you can write for sour apples... but you're the only people trying to come to terms with the really terrific things which are happening today." Money does not drive Mr. Rosewater (or the corrupt lawyer who tries to shape the Rosewater fortune) so much as outrage at the human condition.

The novel was adapted for a 1979 Alan Menken musical. The novel is told mostly thru a collection of short stories dealing with Eliot's interactions with the citizens of Rosewater County, usually with the last sentence serving as a punch line. The antagonist's tale, Mushari's, is told in a similar short essay fashion. The stories reveal different hypocrisies of humankind in a darkly humorous fashion.]]> 288 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0385333471 Ben 4 3.95 1965
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Ben
average rating: 3.95
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rating: 4
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]]> 9592 Librarian note: Alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.]]> 288 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0385334141 Ben 3 4.24 1962
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Ben
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1962
rating: 3
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]]> 135479 Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he's the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh...]]> 306 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Ben 4 4.17 1963
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Ben
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1963
rating: 4
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]]> 37781 “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama

“African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison

"A magical writer—one of the greats of the twentieth century." —Margaret Atwood

Named one of America's most-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into 57 languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.]]> 215 Chinua Achebe Ben 5 3.74 1958
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Ben
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1958
rating: 5
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]]> 52090 The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann sparked a flurry of debate upon its publication.

This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling and unsettled issues of the twentieth century that remains hotly debated to this day.]]> 312 Hannah Arendt Ben 4 4.23 1963
author: Hannah Arendt
name: Ben
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1963
rating: 4
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]]> 293534 Argues the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 activated a series of political and cultural responses that were profoundly colonial in nature. The first analysis of the "war on terror" to connect events in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Traces the connections between geopolitics and the lives of ordinary people. Richly illustrated and packed with empirical detail.]]> 400 Derek Gregory 1577180909 Ben 4 4.36 2004
author: Derek Gregory
name: Ben
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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]]> 2526 No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.

Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.

A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.

This is not anarchy, this is blindness.

‘Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet’ Independent]]> 326 José Saramago Ben 4 4.04 1995
author: José Saramago
name: Ben
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2007/02/01
date added: 2007/10/07
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]]> 9712 348 Gabriel García Márquez 140003468X Ben 4 3.92 1985
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Ben
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/10/07
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]]> 66933 Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.

The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other.

Fanon's analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.]]> 251 Frantz Fanon 0802141323 Ben 4 4.37 1961
author: Frantz Fanon
name: Ben
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2007/10/07
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]]> 9777
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes—Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.]]> 321 Arundhati Roy 0679457313 Ben 4 3.97 1997
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Ben
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2007/10/07
shelves:
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]]> 183042 288 David Harvey 0199278083 Ben 4 3.94 2003
author: David Harvey
name: Ben
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2006/07/01
date added: 2007/10/07
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]]> 183033 247 David Harvey 0199283273 Ben 4 4.14 2005
author: David Harvey
name: Ben
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2006/10/01
date added: 2007/10/07
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]]> 106389 378 David Harvey 0631162941 Ben 5 4.18 1989
author: David Harvey
name: Ben
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at: 2006/10/01
date added: 2007/10/07
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]]> 14836 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’ s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.]]> 647 Salman Rushdie 0099578514 Ben 5 3.98 1981
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Ben
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2007/09/25
shelves:
review:

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