Islam on the Written Page

It seems to me there has been a huge increase in this country in the number of published books relating to Muslim culture. I have to imagine that 9-11 is the reason for the increase – the same reason it took me so long to pick up any of the Muslim-related books.

I admit that my gut reaction to the murders of September 11, 2001 was one of anger. Then, I developed a rather nasty desire for revenge. I worked in a Muslim country for almost ten years (1992-2002), living in Algeria when it was safe to do so and commuting there from London or Houston when it was not. I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Muslims from Algeria, Tunisa, France, Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, and India. I was naïve enough to believe I had a good understanding of Muslim culture as it relates to the ordinary citizens of those countries. I made many Muslim friends and still keep in touch with some of them today despite not having seen them since mid-2002. My anger about the events of 9-11 was/is always just beneath the surface and I had no desire to read about Muslim culture, even in the sense that it is always better to know your enemy than not.

But one day I started to notice a constant stream of new books about Muslims, some written by Muslims, some not. Suddenly it seemed there were interesting new novels and intriguing nonfiction books about Muslims everywhere I looked. The book that finally broke the ice for me was Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a book I still think about sometimes. I didn’t read that one until May 2007 when it appeared in trade paperback, but I followed it up quickly with a hardcover version of Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. From there, I was off to the races and, during the last two years or so, I have read another 23 titles relating to Muslim culture: 15 novels and 8 nonfiction books.

Looking back, I see that the titles are all over the map. Many of them are serious looks at the culture and many of them are thrillers and detective fiction set in Muslim countries. Strange as it might sound, I think I learn every bit as much about the culture from fiction as I do from the nonfiction titles I have been reading.

In addition to the two Hosseini titles, I've read these:

Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir by Marina Nemat (Nonfiction - Iran)

Now They Call Me Infidel - Nonie Darwish (Nonfiction - Egypt)

Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Nonfiction - Somalia)

The Prisoner of Guantanamo - Dan Fesperman (Novel about Gitmo)

The Amateur Spy - Dan Fesperman (Novel set in Jordan and Jerusalem)

Live from Jordan - Benjamin Orbach (Nonfiction set in Jordan)

The Sirens of Baghdad - Yasmina Khadra (novel set in Iraq)

Finding Nouf - Zoe Ferraris - (novel set in Saudi Arabia)

In the Land of Invisible Women - Qanta A. Ahmed (Nonfiction - Saudi Arabia)

Land of Marvels - Barry Unsworth (Novel set in Egypt)

Harbor - Lorraine Adams (Novel set in Algeria and U.S.)

The Weight of a Mustard Seed - Wendell Steavenson (Nonfiction - Iraq)

Fidali's Way - George Mastras (Novel set in Pakistan and Kashmir)

The Writing on My Forehead - Nafisa Haji - (Novel about immigrants to U.S. from Pakistan)

Rooftops of Tehran - Mahbod Seraji - (Novel set in Iran)

Saffron Dreams - Shaila Abdullah (Novel about Pakistani immigrants in New York)

Pursuit of Honor - Vince Flynn (Thriller about Muslim terrorists in U.S.)

Protect and Defend - Vince Flynn (Thriller about Muslim terrorists in U.S.)

My Prison, My Home - Haleh Esfandiari (Nonfiction set in Iran)

The Samaritan's Secret - Matt Beynon Rees (Novel set in Palestine)

A Grave in Gaza - Matt Beynon Rees (Novel set in Gaza Strip)

A Time to Betray - Reza Kahlilli (Nonfiction set in Iran)

The Jewell of Medina - Sherry Jones (Novel about life of Mohamed)

Admittedly, these books are very different from each other. I don't regret reading any of them - all added to my understanding of Muslim culture - and that was the point.

The Malthusian Catastrophe

“What would you do differently if you learned right now that you had one thousand years to live?”

That is the question put to Michael Jeffs during his job interview at Aseso Nutraceuticals, a company whose sole product is an herbal supplement called Sinsen. That huge numbers of people across the globe believe Sinsen to be an effective anti-aging product, does not hurt the company one little bit and, in fact, Aseso’s biggest problem is one of keeping up with the enormous demand for its product. But think about that question for a minute. What would you do if you found there was a way to keep yourself from aging? Would you be willing to spend whatever it takes to get your hands on the magic pills, even at the expense of money you might have spent to the long-term benefit of your children? Or would you prefer to live a normal lifespan because you do not believe in playing God - and you simply want to grow old with your partner and children?

David Oats and Toshiro Tanaka, co-founders of Aseso, are brilliant men in more ways than one. Not only are they responsible for the discovery and production of Sinsen, they are also smart enough to avoid the attention of the FDA. By letting rumor and word-of-mouth work in their favor rather than directly claiming that Sinsen provides medical benefits for its users, the two doctors are able to market their product as just another herbal supplement, something the FDA does not regulate. Their secrets, and their monopoly, will remain safe from competitors as long as the FDA is uninterested in testing their “herbal supplement.”

The Malthusian Catastrophe, by first-timer Ernesto Robles, is a look at what might happen when limited supply meets unlimited demand on a product that could very well be the difference between living and dying. The book illustrates a world in which demand for a product, one that can only be produced in mass quantities by cutting back on food production, continues to grow beyond the planet’s ability to provide the resources necessary to create it. What will happen when the vast majority of the world’s population is priced out of the market? Do national governments have any responsibility to offer potential immortality to everyone within their borders, regardless of ability to pay?

Nineteenth-century (or is it 18th century, since he straddles both of them) economist Thomas Malthus said that when the world’s population grows to a level high enough to outstrip its food supply, catastrophes such as mass starvation, devastating disease, and major wars will occur until the food supply is once again able to sustain the surviving population. Offered the possibility of living forever, would the citizens of the world finally prove Malthus correct?

Ernesto Robles explores to good effect these and other complicated moral issues in The Malthusian Catastrophe. The real beauty of the book, however, is how successfully Robles cloaks all the social issues inside such an entertaining thriller. This is an intriguing debut novel, one that will leave the reader wondering what, given the same circumstances, his own choices would be.

Rated at: 4.0

Talking Library for the Visually Impaired

I think that I'm typical of most avid readers in that one of the worst nightmares I can imagine is the loss of my sight. Never does a day by without me picking up a book or two to sneak in as much reading time as I can manage. No matter what I accomplish in a given day, if I have not read at least a few dozen pages, the day feels wasted. So stories like this one from the Rome News-Tribune (GA) really make my day.


Picture from: Rome News Tribune

(The Northwest Georgia Talking Library provides flash drives preloaded with books (left) and digital players used to play them free of charge for those who can no longer read for visual reasons or who can no longer physically hold books. (Kevin Myrick/RN-T))

The program, which covers 11 counties in Northwest Georgia, provides books through the National Library Service for the blind and physically handicapped.

Delana Hickman, the local talking book library coordinator, said the books are typically for those who can no longer read regular print on books or who can no longer hold books.

“What we do is we send audiobooks through the mail on flash memory,” she said. “We have all types of books, magazines and periodicals available.”

[...]

Those who use the service are beginning to transition over to a new digital player provided by the library which takes the books, stored on a USB-type flash drive, and plays them using simple controls.

Hickman said that before the new players patrons used cassettes, which were harder to use.

Take a look at the article for more details. This all sounds so simple, considering today's technology, but imagine what a great thing this is for people who find it difficult to read the printed word.

I think I'll sleep a little better tonight - one less nightmare to worry about.

Roadside Crosses

I enjoy a good whodunit as much as the next guy and I am relatively easy to please when it comes to the type of detective novel/thriller so popular today. I do, though, expect a few things from the author: fully-fleshed main characters, explicit descriptions of crime scenes, and side plots to reveal more about the makeup of the main character’s life, among them. Most important of all, though, I expect the author to play fair with me as a reader. Just give me a chance to figure out “whodunit” on my own – fool me if you can, but give me a fighting chance. That is where Jeffery Deaver let me down in Roadside Crosses. I found out, only after reading well over 500 pages, that I never really had a chance.

Those roadside crosses placed along the highways of America at the scenes of fatal accidents seem a little creepy to many people even though they probably feel sympathy for those who placed the crosses there. In Roadside Crosses, Jeffery Deaver imagines just how creepy it would be if someone planted roadside crosses along the highway to announce the date of his next murder.

That is exactly what someone in California is doing and agent Kathryn Dance of the California Bureau of Investigation and her crew are finding it impossible to stop him. Dance suspects the killer might be a sixteen-year-old victim of cyber-bullying who is seeking the ultimate revenge on those who have most viciously attacked him on “The Chilton Report,” a hugely popular blog based in his home town. The young man is being vilified on the blog because of his involvement in an accident that claimed the lives of two popular high school girls he barely knew. Dance’s efforts to track the killer, and to identify his potential victims, take her deep into the worlds of blogging and internet gaming and she is shocked by the viciousness she finds there – and how the cyber world is more important to some people than the real world.

With every new victim, Dance becomes more desperate to stop the killer but she cannot escape the other distractions in her life. Her boss, who is all about bureau politics and covering his own butt, ups the pressure on her every day to end the case – or to show enough obvious progress to keep the papers and his own CBI bosses calm. Her mother has been arrested and charged with a mercy killing (see the previous Kathryn Dance novel for a tie-in from there) and Dance feels that she is letting her mother down by spending so much time on the Roadside Crosses case. To top things off, she is a single mom trying to raise two young children on her own.

Roadside Crosses is filled with enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning pages – there is, in fact, much to like about this novel. The concept of a killer pre-announcing his kills through roadside crosses is intriguing; the cyber-investigation into the gaming and blogging societies is interesting; and Kathryn Dance is an absorbing enough character to merit her continuing series. But, and it is a big “but,” I still feel so cheated by how the book’s ending unfolded that I feel I wasted my time with it.

Rated at: 2.5

Drood

Drood is more than a book; it is an experience, a total immersion into Victorian England and the personal lives of two of the most famous authors of the day: Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Either way the reader chooses to experience this Dan Simmons book, by reading it or by listening to the audio book version, requires a major commitment of time and effort. The book itself is almost 800 pages long and the audio version of 24 CDs requires just under 30 hours of listening time. The audio book, read by Simon Prebble, is the route I chose to follow.

Drood begins with the June 1865 train wreck in which Dickens, his mistress and her mother barely escape with their lives. Amidst the mutilated, dead and dying passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish character called Drood; a man Dickens comes to believe is actually taking the lives of injured passengers rather than trying to save them. Dickens becomes obsessed with the idea of Drood and he recruits his close friend, Wilkie Collins, to help him track down the ghostlike man. Dickens, Collins, and various detectives and bodyguards will spend the next several months trying to catch up with the mysterious Drood, a man Dickens is told is responsible for more than 300 London murders. The chase will lead Dickens and Collins into London’s “Undertown,” a cavern-like part of the city, complete with its own underground river system, inhabited largely by criminal gangs, opium dealers and addicts, and London’s thousands of orphaned street children. Things become uncomfortable for the two authors when Drood takes an interest in them and begins to manipulate the pair in unexplainable ways.

There is much more to Drood, however, than the search for a man Dickens believes to be the most successful serial-killer in England’s history. This is the story of two men, both highly successful authors of their day, and their supposed friendship. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins were friends and collaborators for a number of years and the working relationship seems to have served both men well. Simmons, though, chooses the voice of Wilkie Collins to narrate Drood and what Collins has to say about Dickens opens the reader to a whole different possibility about their relationship.

As portrayed here, Wilkie Collins is not a happy man, especially when it comes to comparing his literary status to that of the only man he considers a rival, Charles Dickens. In truth, Collins despises Dickens and cannot believe that the supremacy of his work over that of Dickens is not universally recognized. After all, he has written a masterpiece in The Woman in White and has even created a new genre, that of the detective novel, with The Moonstone. But Dickens is still the literary king of his day – and Charles Dickens is not above reminding Collins of that fact at every opportunity, even if he has to create those opportunities himself.

As Collins struggles to surpass the reputation of Dickens, or at least to equal it, his use of opium increases to such a degree that he begins to lose touch with reality. Collins begins to suspect Dickens of murder (as research for a future novel) and has opium-induced dreams of his own in which he murders Dickens and hides his remains so that “the Inimitable” can never be buried in Westminster Abbey. Opium plays such a large role in Drood – and in Collins’s perception of reality – that the reader will often wonder what is real and what is not. Does Drood really exist or is Dickens making his old friend the victim of a sadistic practical joke? One has to decide for himself but, in the end, it does not really matter because this book is really about the clash of two massive egos and the drug culture of the day. The mysterious Drood is just the hook on which Simmons hangs this clever character-study.

Dan Simmons has written a wonderfully atmospheric, character-driven thriller that is almost certain to appeal to lovers of British literature. The audio book reader, Simon Prebble, does a remarkable job in making Dickens, Collins, and a cast of assorted characters come to life. He does such a good job of providing distinct accents and speech patterns for the main characters that they are soon recognizable by the “sounds of their voices,” a feat few audio book readers even come close to achieving.

Rated at: 4.0

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott

Two female authors from past centuries, different as their personal lives were, still command extreme loyalty and interest from their readers. Jane Austen, because so little is known about her life and personality, lends herself easily to the current craze in speculative fiction about authors from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Louisa May Alcott, though, is Austen’s opposite when it comes to what is known about her personal life. Alcott used so many of the real-life experiences of the Alcott family in her own fiction that her loyal readers already feel that they know everything worth knowing about her. That aside, first-time novelist Kelly O’Connor McNees now offers a tale about a supposed “lost summer” during which Alcott experienced the passionate, though short-lived, romance of her lifetime.

The summer in The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott begins when 20-year-old Louisa moves with her family from Boston to Walpole, New Hampshire, because her father is once again dependent on the goodwill of friends to provide a temporary home for his large family. Louisa does not expect much good to come from the move and she intends to escape to Boston (where she hopes to kick her writing career into high gear) as soon as she feels the family has successfully settled into its new lifestyle. But, as is so often the case, life happens first, and Louisa finds herself reconsidering her plans – a most shocking turn of events because it involves her romantic feelings for a young man, feelings Louisa fights hard to ignore. On a trip to the town’s general store to purchase material for new curtains, Louisa and her sister meet Joseph Singer, a young man clerking in the family business for his desperately ill father. Louisa feels a strong attraction to Joseph but denies it even to herself. Joseph, on the other hand, feels the same attraction to Louisa and is determined to court her despite whatever obstacles she might throw his way.

Louisa’s “lost summer” will be one filled with tragedy, misunderstanding, passion, anger, tenderness, tears, laughter, sadness and sacrifice – even an amateur stage production. But although this short summer will forever change Louisa May Alcott and Joseph Singer, it will not, as Alcott’s fans already know, divert her from her path toward spinsterhood. Louisa’s strong desire to live her life as an independent woman beholden to no man would not so easily be overcome.

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott does a nice job of capturing the atmosphere of small-town America in the decade just prior to the American Civil War. The Walpole of 1855 is portrayed as the kind of place in which everyone knows everyone else, a town in which those of courting age still do so much as described in the novels of Jane Austen – but also a town in whom much is going on just below the emotional surface of many of its residents. As Louisa will learn, family connections are important and marriages are still sometimes arranged by fathers strictly for financial reasons.

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott is a rather straightforward historical romance novel, but it is an interesting one because of its main character. I particularly recommend it to those readers who already have a built-in fascination for anything to do with Ms. Alcott – for them, despite it not offering an alternate history, this one will be like reading about an old friend.

Rated at: 3.5

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)