• The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall *** (of 4)

    Mr. Vish Puri, chief detective of the Most Private Investigating Company, solves Delhi crimes.  Well, he solves crimes when he isn’t investigating philandering spouses.  The crime in this mystery is not terribly complex and the investigation team is more comic than CSI.  Nevertheless, Hall captures contemporary India in transition.  Every topic, and then some, investigated by Anand Giridarardhas in his scholarly India Calling is on display in this book.  You’ll have to pay close attention to keep track of India’s current class and caste struggles, the exchange of old British-derived stodginess for the mishmash of new India, and the frustration of corruption.  Much of it passes by as humor, but don’t be fooled.  This author has captured India today and the reading is easy.

  • India Calling by Anand Giridharadas *** (of 4)

    A young NY Times journalist, Anand Giridharadas was born and raised in the U.S. to parents who immigrated from India to escape that country’s stultifying economy of the 1960s.  He returns to India after college to work.  He discovers a country mid-transition from rural, caste-dominated, and tradition-bound to full throttle modernity.  Not only must he come to terms with a country he recalls from childhood visits and stories not really matching what his parents left behind, but simultaneously he describes India not quite living up to its reputation as an engine of commerce, democracy, and progress.  There are stalled dreams, thinly veiled prejudices, Indian-bred inefficiencies, and heart-breaking corruption.  The book begins with deep insight and then slows to a crawl.  Without much outside evidence in the form of data to back his observations I began to wonder on what basis he could make his sweeping assertions.  To his credit he calls it like he sees it.  To his detriment, it’s hard to know how much of what he sees is accurate.  In the end it was just too much work to read all the way to the end.

  • Untouchables : My Family’s Triumphant Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India by Narendra Jadhav

    I have to admit I only read the first 50 pages of this book. Nevertheless, the fictional account of life in India’s lower castes, A Fine Balance by Rohatyn Mistry, is ten times more informative and hundred times more interesting. “Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Journey” confirmed that “A Fine Balance” may be fictional, but it certainly is not fictitious.

  • Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin ** (of 4)

    I know everyone loved this book. It’s a best seller and a book club must-do, but I couldn’t finish it. Too much hagiography. Too many adjectives. In some ways the book jacket gives it away, and then so does the introduction, and then every page after that. A man with no future beyond rock climbing foresakes all things American to build schools for disenfranchised Pakistani girls and becomes a world hero. Somehow it all seemed too moralistic. September 2008.

  • The Places in Between by Rory Stewart **, maybe *** (of 4)

    The New York Times book reviewer called this a masterpiece of travel writing — he was downright gaga over this book, calling it one of the best travelogues ever written. It’s about a guy who walks across Afghanistan in the middle of winter. And doesn’t die. I found the book a little enigmatic. It’s strongest when Stewart is writing about his personal travails: inhospitable village elders, vicious diarrhea, a stubborn dog. But it’s weakness is a lack of context, story line, indistinguishable characters, and absence of a full explanation for why he decided to walk for 19 months through Pakistan, Nepal, India, Iran, and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, what emerges from his 40 or so short chapters are snapshots of a part of the world and its men (women are almost entirely invisible on his trek) that I know nothing about: rural, tribal Afghanistan. November 2006.

  • The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright **** (of 4)

    You know at the beginning the story will end with planes flying into the World Trade Center, but Wright’s recounting makes the book a suspenseful thriller, nonetheless. His explanation of the rise of Al Qaeda from the writings of a disgruntled Egyptian expatriate to Osama provide context hard to find in the media. The psychoanalysis of Osama and his cult-like followers is especially insightful. March 2007.

  • The White Tiger by Arivan Adiga ** (of 4)

    Hard to imagine why this book won the 2008 Booker Prize, England’s Pulitzer. The protagonist is a low-caste Indian who makes good, but most of the book is supposed to be an antidote to the lyrical prose of British writers who focused on genteelity and upper-crustism in India. But after forty pages of filth, corruption, poverty, and disease we get the point. After 140 pages, enough already. Read A Fine Balance, instead. That book covers much of the same despair and hope, but is a written by a future Nobel Prize winner. October 2008.

  • Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri *** (of 4)

    Compelling in the way of an auto crash. I could not look away, but I definitely felt worse for having partaken. Like her Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri delivers a compendium of short stories about the first and second generation lives of college-educated New England Bengalis. Only thing is by her accounting their lives consist nearly entirely of remorse, despair, despondence, regret, cancer, alcohol , duplicity, and disloyalty. March 2009.

  • A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini *** (of 4)

    A bottomless well of hopelessness, despair and background warfare in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion of the 80s through the American invasion post 9/11. Seen through the eyes of two women who lose nearly everything they can imagine either blown to bits around them or whose common husband senselessly beats them. And yet. Hosseini’s crystaline writing and, in my case, Atossi Leoni’s heart wrenching reading simultaneously suffocated and repelled me. I wanted to stop the pain, but could not turn away; instead I lay awake for nights praying for salvation for Leilo and Miryam, two women who endured. December 2007