Pikibaya Books

The Places in Between

2006-09-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Places in Between

Rory Stewart

I hate to admit it, but I picked up this book because of its cover. The title caught my eye, and the back cover explained that Stewart, a crazy Scotsman, traveled through Afghanistan on foot in order to see the land in between places marked on maps. He followed the same route that Emperor Babur took while conquering Central Asia in the 13th century, and paralleled Babur’s Afghanistan with the modern country. Stewart juxtaposed his own experiences with those of Babur’s caravan, and surprisingly, there were many similarities, due to the fact that the environment is still very rugged, violent, and rarely traveled by outsiders.

I really liked Stewart’s writing style. He is very matter-of-fact and, unlike many travel writers, he thankfully leaves out the long-winded descriptions of landscapes, for the most part. He recounts his experiences, but leaves it to the readers to draw our own conclusions. His experiences run the gamut from totally depressing to absolutely hilarious, and he doesn’t leave anything out (his discusses his diarrhea problem every five pages or so!). Stewart is very attuned to peoples’ body language and mannerisms, and he explains the important meaning behind every subtle action, such as what order people are greeted in, and where people are seated around a table. Being completely unfamiliar with Afghan culture, Stewart’s explanations of these cultural practices were very helpful in helping me understand the interactions he had with people along the way. He also included his own amateur sketches into the book, which made it feel like a real travel journal.

The most interesting of Stewart’s observations was that Afghans identify all landmarks not by name, but by recent violent events that happened there. Because the country has been marred by war and violence for so many years, people describe things as, “this is the valley is where I shot four Taliban last year,” or, “that road is where my neighbors were killed by mines last month.” It brought to mind a book I read by Bruce Chatwin (The Songliners), in which Chatwin shows that Australian aborigines, like Afghans, do not describe natural landmarks by name, but instead by centuries-old songs about their human and animal ancestors, and the legends that took place at that landmark. What a contrast! Stewart mentioned Chatwin, and also compared this to his own journeys in other Middle Eastern and Asian countries, where people commonly remember landmarks by historical events, but not by recent violence. Stewart illustrates that after fighting the Russians, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, the U.S., and each other, violence is at the center of Afghan culture and identity, and shapes their perception of the world.

I really admire Stewart’s courage. I think of myself as a fairly adventurous person, but hiking through a war-torn country alone is a bit much even for me (Stewart was told by the Afghan government—which did everything it could to prevent his travels, short of killing him—that he was the only tourist the country had had in many years!). On the other hand, I disliked some aspects of Stewart’s personality. He was incredibly stubborn—to the point of endangering his Afghan guides at times—and his behavior in some situations made me feel uncomfortable. He also seemed a bit judgmental of some aspects of Afghan culture, particularly about they treat animals and disregard the importance of their country’s archaeology. Stewart did explain the reasons behind these cultural characteristics, yet still came across as disapproving. However, I appreciate his honest exposure of his own flaws. A few times he mentions his own doubts about the way he handled certain situations, and also admits to reacting to things immaturely because he was feeling grumpy or frustrated (but his grumpiness and frustration were generally justified!). He also appeared to have very little, if any, affection for most of the people he encountered—except when he was in the territory of the Hazara people—but again, given the experiences he recounted, it seems understandable, and I was impressed that a writer was willing to admit those things about himself.

I did feel that Stewart spent too much time talking about Babur, the aptly-named dog he picked up along the way. Towards the end, the book read like a “man and his dog” story, and I’d been hoping for more focus on the people he met and the stories he heard from them. Despite the flaws, though, I’d definitely recommend this fascinating book for its candidness and humor, and because it reveals so much about modern Afghans and how they became who they are.

In Dubious Battle

2006-08-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

In Dubious Battle
John Steinbeck

A novel based on the apple pickers’ strikes in California, this book had all the elements of a great book—class warfare, Salinas Valley history, honest farmworkers versus evil landowners—and, disappointingly, I didn’t like it at all. I almost stopped reading it but I kept telling myself that it would get better if I just stuck with it to the end. As it turns out, my initial feeling was right, and I regret wasting my time reading it. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is an old favorite of mine, and I used to consider him as a great writer, but now I’m not so sure. To his credit, In Dubious Battle is one of his earlier and lesser-known works—and for good reason, as I discovered.

I have three main complaints. First off, I didn’t like the way Steinbeck told the story—in a quick, glossed-over, narrative way. It read like, “first this happened, and then we cruised in and started a strike, and then this happened, and then that happened.” Workers’ struggles, and strikes especially, are extremely complex, emotional, and must develop over time, yet Steinbeck wrote about the strike as if he were a reporter assigned to write a one-paragraph summary for the local paper. Anyone with experience in the labor movement would find this story very unrealistic—a new guy in town can’t just roll in, say, “hey guys, why don’t we go on strike?” and get immediate and nearly unanimous support from the workforce. Yet this is essentially what Steinbeck’s characters did. He attempted to throw in some minor characters who were disillusioned with the worker leadership, but it wasn’t enough to make it feel like Steinbeck had a good understanding of the personal, political, and psychological intricacies behind a strike. Secondly, the characters were very one-dimensional and remained that way throughout the book. I could never get a sense of why the characters were doing the things they did—there was very little personal history, and only feeble attempts to explain what motivated them. My last complaint is about the dialogue. Steinbeck was probably just trying to stay true to the fact that most of the strikers were uneducated laborers, but I swear, every single conversation went something like this:
Mac: “How ya doin’, Jim?”
Jim: “Alright, Mac.”
Is that an interesting enough conversation to actually make somebody read (repeatedly)? No!! The vast majority of the dialogue did nothing to advance the plot or develop the characters, and all it did was get on my nerves.

So, my recommendation is: DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME READING THIS. Steinbeck has some excellent books out there with a similar theme, so focus on those. I’ve heard great things about East of Eden, so I’m going to check it out, and hopefully Steinbeck redeems himself in that one.

The Constant Gardener

2006-08-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

The Constant Gardener
John Le Carré

I loved this movie (starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weiss) so much that I immediately went out and bought the novel it was based on. It is part mystery, part love story, and (what appealed to me the most) part pharmaceutical-company-conspiracy story. Without giving away too much, the main character’s wife, a human rights lawyer (hooray!) discovered that big pharma companies were testing drugs on poor Kenyans; she’d set out to stop them and ended up being murdered. Sounded like an enthralling plot to me!

Unfortunately, I was disappointed, and this may be the only time I’ve actually liked a movie more than a book. I felt Le Carré failed to address the pharmaceutical issue with enough depth, and focused too much on making the main character run all over the world, trying to solve the mystery of his wife’s murder. Of course, it’s just a novel, not an investigative reporting piece, so my expectations were probably too high. I also never really liked the main character; he started out as a spineless bureaucrat, and didn’t develop or grow much—he ended up being merely a regretful spineless bureaucrat. Le Carré also threw in a weird religious character at the end, which felt completely random and disjointed from the rest of the book.

Overall, Le Carré’s writing reminded me of Dan Brown’s (DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons)—too exciting to put down, which is the good part. The bad part is that like Brown, Le Carré consistently got on my nerves with his homogenous “beautiful smart woman” and “middle-aged nerdy man” characters. If you’re looking for a page-turner, this is definitely worth a read, but if you’re looking for a substantive manifesto against the pharmaceutical industry (and yes, I do realize I might be the only weirdo in the world looking for this), you’ll be disappointed.

Pathologies of Power

2006-08-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor
Paul Farmer

This fascinating book shows how the fight for economic rights, particularly access to health care, is the major human rights struggle in the world today. For those of you who don’t know, human rights protections stemming from international treaties have traditionally been divided into two categories: civil and political (due process, freedom of speech, the right to vote, etc.) and economic and social (the right to housing, education, health care, etc.). These divisions are reminiscent of cold war politics—the U.S. has historically championed civil and political rights and ignored economic rights, while many other nations (particularly former Soviet countries, Cuba, and South Africa) are quite progressive in their protections of economic and social rights, yet sometimes discount the civil and political ones. However, these categories are interdependent, and you can’t separate them if you want to work towards building a truly just society: for example, how can a citizen fully utilize her right to vote if she can’t read well enough to inform herself about the election? How important is free speech to a poverty-stricken person who can barely make it from one day to the next? Only recently have U.S.-based advocates begun to litigate cases about economic rights, and to argue that a lack of jobs, housing, and medical care is a human rights violation. My career interests, as well as my reading interests, have started to sway more towards economic rights, and health in particular, so I found Pathologies of Power to be a very powerful and informative book.

Paul Farmer is a medical doctor, an anthropologist, and the founder of a nonprofit that provides health care services in poor communities throughout the world. This book outlines the lessons he’s learned from his extensive experience caring for the poor, which he illustrates with case studies. One interesting case study is about the looming public health crisis in Russia, caused by the appalling levels of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in its prisons. For some reason I had never thought about how important it is, in terms of public health, to ensure that prisoners, as well as the rest of the population, have adequate drugs and medical care. Farmer illustrated this well with the Russian example, where petty criminals are held for months or years before being charged, and where 80% of the people who enter—whether or not they end up being convicted of a crime—contract tuberculosis. In the U.S., too, prisons are often cesspools of disease, which violates the prisoners’ human rights and endangers the public’s health when prisoners re-enter society. Farmer demonstrated how in Russia, the government and well-meaning international organizations actually make the problem worse by only partially funding efforts to control TB. Treatment of multi-drug-resistant TB requires intensive and expensive drug therapy, but if patients get the wrong type of drugs, or receive it at the wrong time or in insufficient quantities, their symptoms worsen and the virus becomes even more resistant to drugs. Dedicated nurses and doctors are not enough; there must be a well-planned, well-funded initiative to treat patients and prevent the illness from spreading among the rest of the population.

Farmer compared the Russian prison situation to the TB crisis in New York City in the late 80s and early 90s. After many years of federal budget cuts in public health programs, and advocates unsuccessfully crying for help, the city government finally stepped in when the disease reached epidemic proportions among the general population. By making a substantial investment in the public’s health, the city was finally able to put an end to the crisis; however, if action had been taken sooner, many lives would have been saved. Farmer used the New York TB example to show that when the political will exists, diseases can be cured, and the health of poor communities can improve.

Farmer also analyzed Cuba’s highly effective treatment of HIV, the Zapatistas’ demands that the right to health care among poor Chiapans be recognized, his own clinic’s successes in Haiti, and health crises in several other countries. He demonstrates that, contrary to the claims of most governments and international agencies, public health crises in poor communities can be avoided. Most governments and international agencies primarily concern themselves with the “cost effectiveness” of addressing health crises in poverty-stricken areas; Farmer demonstrates how small things—like providing patients with a small stipend so they can eat more nutritious food, or providing transportation to health clinics in rural areas—can greatly increase patients’ chances of recovering; so, rather than treating a disease or an individual patient, an investment must made in a whole community. Though much of his discussion was focused on foreign countries, Farmer does not fail to address the U.S.’s denial of adequate health care to the poor. Throughout the book, he stresses that worldwide “structural violence” (disparities in access to economic opportunity, housing, education, etc.) is the root cause of premature deaths among the poor, and that structural violence must be addressed if human rights are to be protected.

Health problems can be solved—if there’s a political will to do so, if resources are allocated correctly, and if the health of entire communities, rather than just individuals, is addressed in a holistic manner. This means we must demand that governments and international organizations ensure that adequate nutrition and shelter, clean water and sewage systems, and access to health education and medical care are made available to all members of society, particularly the poor, who are most vulnerable to disease. Anything less is unacceptable; yet, most people in power would consider this a radical idea, because no one is willing to foot the bill—poor people just aren’t worth it. Farmer notes that the human rights movement is also partially to blame, because it fails to adequately fight for health care to be recognized as a human right.

Overall, I found Farmer to be incredibly well-informed, eloquent, and critical, yet without making me feel like giving up in despair. He provides thoughtful analysis of health as a human right, and suggests solutions to many of the problems he addresses.

***
Here’s an example of a possible step in the right direction from today’s paper: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/world/africa/14aids.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Unfortunately the article is very congratulatory and low on critical analysis, and fails to put blame where it’s due. For example, the reporter states, “Only a few years ago, there was widespread skepticism that AIDS treatment programs would work in poor countries. The drugs were considered too costly and too hard to deliver to those who needed them…” without addressing the governments and agencies that held this attitude, and whether this attitude is expected to change after seeing Zambia’s success.

Zorro

2006-08-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

Zorro
Isabel Allende
I’ve been obsessed with Zorro ever since Antonio Banderas played him in the movie—a guy who liberates the poor, fights with a sword, and knows how to dance? What more could a girl want? And I loved Allende’s House of the Spirits, so I figured this book would be fantastic. I guess my expectations were too high.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s worth reading, but I found it disappointing. Allende chronicles Zorro’s life from birth through adulthood, and his adventures take him through Spain, Louisiana, and California. She attempted to show how his childhood and adolescent experiences led him to become Zorro as an adult, but I wasn’t convinced by it—I thought she portrayed him as a stubborn, spoiled brat throughout much of the book, and I never really warmed up to the character. I was also disappointed that he fell in love with Juliana, the more beautiful sister with the most boring personality EVER, instead of her sister Isabel, the less attractive of the two but the one who is ass-kickingly cool. (Maybe I’m getting tired of the old “falling in love with the most beautiful woman and dueling her other suitors” thing).

I guess the main problem for me was that Zorro’s character wasn’t as awesome as I had always imagined him to be, and of course it’s not Allende’s job to read my mind. But I felt that the writing wasn’t very high quality, either. The book felt like more of a narrative (first this happened, then he did this thing, then he did this), without any real attempt to develop the characters and explore their inner thoughts and motivations. My favorite characters were the smaller ones, and I wish they’d been given a bigger role.

However, it’s still a great adventure to read, and it’s a page-turner. I enjoyed reading about olden-days California, and I liked that Allende incorporated Indian characters into the story; that made it feel more authentic.

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories

2006-08-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories
Tim Burton

I love Tim Burton’s movies, so I was soooo excited when I discovered this book. It’s a collection of Burton’s bizarre, twisted, funny, yet childlike poems and drawings. His stories have titles like “The Boy with Nails in his Eyes,” “The Girl who Turned into a Bed,” and “Jimmy, the Hideous Penguin Boy.” You get the idea. Some characters, like Stain Boy and Oyster Boy, pop up throughout the book. Here’s an example of one of his stories:

The Pin Cushion Queen
Life isn’t easy
for the Pin Cushion Queen.
When she sits on her throne
pins push through her spleen.

I can’t decide whether I enjoy the drawings or the poems more. I don’t have much else to say other than to recommend it when you want a good laugh.

Oyster Boy

Dark Materials Trilogy

2006-08-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

Dark Materials Trilogy:
Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass

The Subtle Knife

The Amber Spyglass

Wow. I cannot say enough good things about this trilogy. I decided to read The Golden Compass because I thought it was a kids’ book, and I needed something light and escapist after the traumatic experience of reading Fiesta del Chivo. I still haven’t quite figured out if this series was written for adults or kids, or both, but it doesn’t matter because I think anyone would love the main characters (a 12-year-old girl and boy), and the story is enthralling no matter how old you are. It is even more captivating and imaginative than the Chronicles of Narnia, yet, unlike the Lord of the Rings and similar fantasy sagas, it doesn’t feel repetitive and circular by the middle of the second book (sorry, Ring nerds, but I’m just not a big fan). This trilogy has all the components of a typical fantasy series—inter-world warfare, evil villains, talking animals, and plenty of magic—yet the story is completely original. Pullman seamlessly weaves together a wide variety of characters and storylines without it getting overwhelming, and his characters are very lovable despite their personal flaws. At the same time, the series deserves its title of “Dark Materials” because some parts are truly frightening, and his villains are perverse and menacing. There is an anti-Church undercurrent throughout, but I felt it added to the plot without dominating it. Over all, I couldn’t put these books down until I had finished the whole trilogy—so make sure you have some time on your hands before you pick them up! I don’t know anyone else who’s read these books, and I would love to hear other peoples’ thoughts on them.

La Fiesta del Chivo

2006-08-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

La Fiesta Del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat)
Mario Vargas Llosa

I picked this up in preparation for my trip to Santo Domingo, partly because I desperately needed to practice my Spanish, and partly because it takes place during the Trujillo dictatorship, an infamous era in Dominican history of which I knew very little about. I had never read any of Vargas Llosa’s books, and had no expectations—and I was blown away!! Despite the language difficulties, I couldn’t put it down. Vargas Llosa smoothly transitions between different narrators and time periods, and tells stories about Trujillo’s regime—and its downfall—from the point of view of different characters, many of whom are based on real Dominican heroes, villains, and martyrs; all the while, he maintains a consistently sinister mood. He makes his characters come alive, (even Trujillo is realistically portrayed as a human instead of the monster he really was!) yet he doesn’t get too bogged down in their details and personal histories, so the story still flows well. Vargas Llosa is Peruvian, yet—as I discovered later—he does an excellent job of mimicking the way Dominicans talk, throwing in just enough “¡joder!” (fuck) to make you feel like you’re there, listening to a real conversation.

Keep in mind, though, that this book is about a notoriously brutal dictator and his courageous assassins; I wasn’t exactly expecting a lighthearted novel or a happily-ever-after portrayal of Trujillo’s demise. But, I have read so many personal accounts of torture and brutality that I am rarely shocked by anything anymore…until now. Apparently Vargas Llosa has a bigger, much more twisted imagination than I do, and there is one torture scene that actually gave me nightmares, and still makes me shudder whenever I think about it. Even scarier is that I don’t know if Vargas Llosa made it up, or if it was something that Ramfis Trujillo’s men actually did! (shudder). So be warned, but don’t let that turn you off; it is an excellent book and a page-turner. It really made me think, too—how much would I be willing to suffer in order to save my country? How far would I have to be pushed before I would be prepared to sacrifice my own life and the lives of my loved ones? And, to what lengths will seemingly normal people go to preserve their wealth and power?

This was recently made into a movie, which as far as I can see, hasn’t been released in the U.S. yet. When it does, I’m definitely there, though I can’t imagine it being on par with the book!!