Get Lost Books

Mundane Journeys: Field Guide to Color Kate Pocrass ( , $5.00) Perhaps you are the kind of person that notices how the color of a Laundromat reflects the decade in which it was designed. Or maybe at Mitchell’s Ice Cream you match the delicate purple of your Ube ice cream to something similarly delicate and purple in the neighborhood. Maybe still you are the kind of person that sees the wider picture; either way Kate Pocrass’ new volume of Mundane Journeys will force you to engage with your surroundings in a way that you may have not considered before. Since 2001, Pocrass has been compiling aesthetically minded guided tours of San Francisco which are available either by calling a phone number and listening to a weekly voicemail message, taking a guided bus tour, or by purchasing this second volume of Mundane Journeys. These colorful micro-adventures are cheap, charming, and provide an idiosyncratic and whimsical way to discover San Francisco. - ADD TO CART	Apples Are From Kazakhstan Christopher Robbins ( Atlas & Co., $24.00) Nursultan Nazarbayev had served as First Secretary of the Kazah Communist Party before becoming Kazakhstan's first post-Soviet president. By the time author Christopher Robbins breaks bread (actually, boiled sheep's head) and flies in the presidential entourage with him, Nazarbayev has privatized the economy; cut multi-billion oil deals with Exxon and Chevron; and built a new capital city 600 hundred miles away from the old one. Robbins perhaps isn't critical enough about the president's authoritarian tendencies, but the word on the street is that Nazarbayev has changed the country for the better. Bar hopping with the beautiful people of Almaty or hanging out with oilmen in the wild West, Robbins is visiting Kazakhstan in the era of globalization. Beyond the people he meets and the beauty of the landscape, Robbins is fascinated with Kazakh's role in history as Russia's place of exile and deportation. Dostoyevsky and Trotsky both spent time exiled here. The Chechnyans, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Korean-Russians were all deported here by Stalin. Robbins is erudite without being stuffy. His year in the country affords us much more than fleeting impressions of the country. - ADD TO CART
Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World Peter Chapman ( Canongate, $24.00) Of the more than 300 varieties of bananas, the Cavendish variety is the one constant on supermarket shelves. Large and thick skinned, it was the banana of choice on the United Fruit Company's plantations throughout Central America. Unlike salt or cod, subjects covered by Mark Kurlansky, banana distribution and consumption is very much the story of modern global capitalism and empire. Beginning in Costa Rica, the United Fruit Company built the railroads, bribed the politicians and acquired the lands that gave it control over the banana market in the 20th century. Author Peter Chapman's book shows how the banana, once enjoyed only by America's elite, became the world's most popular fruit. He follows the many tentacles of the company in this brutal history. Its native and imported labor from China, Italy and the West Indies was paid in scrip, redeemable at company stores. It encouraged the coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala and participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It did business with Somoza and the powerful families of El Salvador. Now known as Chiquita Brands International, the Company was most recently in the news for successfully at the World Trade Organization the European Union over protectionism. The book's title in England, Jungle Capitalists is a fitting description of the bare-knuckled story of the once notorious company. - ADD TO CART	Basrayatha: The Story of a City Muhammad Khudayyir ( Verson, $15.95) For many of us, Basra is a city we think about only when the fighting breaks into our headlines. Muhammad Khudayyir, who was born in Basra and has spent his entire life there, bestows on us an altogether different city in this enthralling work, written in 1996 and newly translated. His Basra is a dreamscape, an inner geography: a compound of memoir, folktale, philosophical speculation and literary allusion. He draws on classic Arabic poetry, as well as modern literary urbanists such as Calvino, Cavafy and (to my astonishment) Foucault, in an effort to convey the city not only as it is, but as it has lived in the imagination of Iraqis for centuries. Of all the hundreds of books published on Iraq in recent years, this may be the only one that emerges from the culture of the country and the artistic life of its people. Khudayyir's intensely allusive and ornamented style, redolent of Arab literary traditions, may at first seem strange to the western reader; but isn't it time we learned to take the rest of the world (and especially Iraq) and its own terms, rather than ours? - ADD TO CART
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story Christina Thompson ( Bloomsbury USA, hardback, $24.95) Christina Thompson is too smart to be satisfied writing a memoir about the miscommunications between a New England academic woman and her Maori working class husband. This is, indeed, a story about Thompson's marriage and family, but it is also a book about history and culture, specifically the history of and misunderstanding between European explorers and the Maori natives of New Zealand. The title of the book is "what Darwin said that Cook said the Maoris said at that interesting moment when the Europeans first appeared," but the quote was further mangled by the editor of Cook's first journals, who added his own remarks and digressions - written in Cook's first person - to heighten Cook's narrative tension. With chapters on cannibalism and head-hunting (and the role colonialism played in the head-hunting market), Thompson presents an unsentimental and insightful story of the two peoples. - ADD TO CART	Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Xialou Guo ( Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95) While not an erotic reference text, this beguiling novel still lives up to the promise of its title. It resembles the recent spate of travel memoirs by British or American women about finding love in distant climes; but reversing the direction of the gaze makes all the difference. A young Chinese woman, spending a year in London to study English, struggles to grasp the strange folkways she encounters, as well as the intricacies of the language. Both sets of difficulties come into play when she has her first love affair, and must come to terms with concepts like intimacy, privacy, possessiveness, romance. In the process we see a new London through her eyes, and learn something about what it’s like to be young and Chinese in this time of wild transition. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange: isn’t that what travel (like the best fiction) is all about? - ADD TO CART
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism Mike Davis, Daniel Bertrand Monk, editors ( The New Press, paperback, $18.95) The “evil paradises” depicted in this anthology are free market utopias built on the unspoken reality of slave labor and robber baron slash-and-burn capitalism. In Davis’ hellish vision of Dubai the divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots seems almost medieval in its brutality and immorality. Huge cartoonish buildings and man-made mega islands built with oil money and the aforementioned slave labor shield the ultra rich from the indignities of having to pay taxes or in some cases serve time in the countries from which they came. Rebecca Shoenkopf’s Orange County is a little less feudal, and makes for a much lighter read though she still, albeit mockingly, covers the disparities between the inland barrios of Santa Ana and the coastal gated communities of Laguna Canyon. The Gated McMansion-residing ladies buy their over-saturated offspring Mercedes convertibles to stave off their baby-bird-like insatiable hunger and empty rage; It reads like an even more soulless Less Than Zero. There are other chapters about faux California-style gated communities in Hong Kong and Cairo and even in Iran’s desert, so perhaps that will be America’s legacy rather than Bush’s promised democracy in the Middle East. - ADD TO CART	God's Middle Finger:Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre Richard Grant ( Free Press, $15.00) Richard Grant had long been fascinated by the Sierra Madre, a vast land of extremes that lies over much of western Mexico. It is a range marked by barrancas, steep-sided ravines where one can stand on snowy peaks and look down onto the backs of tropical birds flying over rainforest canopy. This forbidding geography provides refuge for outlaws and narcotraficantes as well as bored, drunk rednecks. Grant encounters all of these in his journey, and his fate often depends on their whims. The book opens with the author literally being hunted for sport. Later he finds himself forced to snort cocaine with crooked cops in a dirty cantina. He takes his brushes with danger in stride, turning nerve-wracking experiences into enlightening anecdotes. - ADD TO CART
Good-bye Yoshihiro Tatsumi ( Drawn and Quarterly, $19.95) As the first generation of manga reading children grew up in the sixties and seventies, they wanted something written for an adult audience. Tatsumi coined the term gekiga (Japanese for “dramatic pictures”) to refer to the more adult-oriented work that he and others were creating. He helped to define the genre, but is now largely forgotten in Japan. He is enjoying renewed popularity in America, though, thanks largely to Drawn and Quarterly’s annual publications of his work. Good-bye encompasses stories from 1970-71. In “Hell”, an amateur photographer captures the shadow of a son massaging his mother’s shoulders that was seared onto a wall when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After the image has gained world fame as an icon of peace, the photographer discovers it is not the image of a devoted son after all, but of a man strangling a woman from behind. Most of the stories are not as heavy on plot, but are succinct vignettes of the mundane struggles and frustrated passions of ordinary people. There are no innocents in these stories. Although we may be disgusted by the behavior of his characters, they are pitiful and evoke sympathy. - ADD TO CART	Hamburger Eyes: Inside Burgerworld Ray Potes ( Powerhouse, $35.00) Hamburger Eyes started life as a photo zine put together by the Potes brothers and their friends out of their Mission apartment. Now they have this book and their own photo development complex and art gallery, still in the Mission district and still serving as a document of underground street culture and art. The Hamburger Eyes aesthetic is a distinctly deadpan, black humor laden take on photo realism; some of the images remind me of classic war photography, the stark brutality and ideas of 'truth' transposed to 3am on Market Street, juxtaposed with an image of a kid inventing a hula hoop out of toilet paper. - ADD TO CART
Invisible-5 Amy Balkan, Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice, and others ( Collaboration, $15.00) In California, Interstate 5 is straight as an arrow and runs through the center of the state. A commuter sees undeveloped desert, the aqueducts, fields of almond trees and cattle in massive pens. What they don’t see, or at least, don’t recognize, are the hazardous waste incinerators, nuclear facilities, power plants, polluted water tables and the people that live around these sites. Invisible 5, a project by artist Amy Balkin and collaborators, explores the geopolitics of this once sparsely populated area that has suffered most of California’s environmental degradation and the attendant health problems on its local population. The 2 CD set, meant to be played along the route from San Francisco to Los Angeles or vice versa, features local activists and historians discussing local environmental issues and the community responses. You quickly realize how little you have heard about these stories and how important they are to these communities. The CDs come with directions, map, audio cues and more information on each site. All sales benefit Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice. - ADD TO CART	Literature from the 'Axis of Evil': Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other Enemy Nations A Words Without Borders Anthology ( The New Press, $16.95) The absurdity of labeling an entire culture or nation of people ï¿½evilï¿½ not only makes those who said it look foolish, but brings about the need to put a human face on those internationally misunderstood and marginalized cultures. Words Without Borders does just that, presenting a special selection of some of the best writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba. For those of us with little knowledge about these places, this collection gives us a glimpse into human realities that our government wants us to fear and/or hate. When we look, listen, and learn we find familiar themes: family, adolescence, ideas of beauty, loneliness, kindness -- a wonderful breath of fresh air. - ADD TO CART
Lust In Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee Pamela Druckerman ( Penguin Books, $15.00) This is a fun, light-hearted book on what in what many cultures passes for a fun, light-hearted topic: adultery. As the title suggests, Druckerman examines varying cultural attitudes towards infidelity. While she is the first to admit that her study is none too scientific and somewhat subjective, she does make insightful and surprising observations. The main conclusion she draws is that Americans freak out about cheating way more than the rest of the planet. The book is full of fun little observations about the sexual mores of other nations, like, for example, that the Japanese don’t consider it cheating if you pay for it. Most interesting, however, is the outsider’s perspective of our own moral code, and what many cultures would consider to be an extremist hard-line attitude towards cheating (even though we seem to be doing it as much as the rest of the globe). - ADD TO CART	Moth Smoke Mohsin Hamid ( Picador, paperback, $14.00) Moth Smoke is set in a Pakistan that is quite different from the one that filters through the lens of the American media; the characters that populate the novel exist within (or just outside) a decadent, ecstasy-fueled party world quite opposite from the sectarian violence that characterizes the 'western' idea of Pakistan. Moshin Hamid's writing is tense and cool. It manages to exemplify and skewer the moral lassitude of the people he depicts. When we first meet Daru, he is a cynical pot smoking investment banker who flirts with a rich old school friend's beautiful sardonic wife. It's clear Daru feels separate from this crowd both financially and psychologically. He is disparaging in the manner of an outsider who covets the idle rich lifestyle but is also contemptuous of its excesses. We follow Daru's descent from one who hovers just outside of these air-conditioned mansions and SUVs like a moth in a streetlight through his slide into an electricity-free drug haze. The tightly wrought multi-narrator format opens up modern Pakistan, exposing its contradictions and corruptions. Moshin Hamid's modern voice and dark humored prose make this Great Gatsby-esque morality tale an elegantly compelling read. - ADD TO CART
Nazi Literature in the Americas Roberto Bolano ( New Directions, $23.95) The masterpieces by the late Chilean/Mexican writer keep rolling off the presses as quickly as the translators can render them. As with everything Bolaï¿½o produced, this is one-of-a kind; an imaginary, ï¿½value-neutralï¿½ reference work, complete with bibliography and scholarly notes. The entries do in fact constitute a kind of encyclopedia: a compendium of the ways in which the literary imagination negotiates with, rationalizes, or embraces evil; but the really scary part is the passionate and pure devotion to literature they all share, along with their repugnant politics. This survey of the Nazi literary canon that never actually existed somehow manages to be simultaneously playfully funny and deeply disturbing. - ADD TO CART	New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg Marshall Berman, ed. ( Reaktion, $25.00) Put together by the Marxist scholar Berman, this collection of essays focuses on New York City as a memory, working as a tribute to a lost city and its poets, immigrants, deadbeats, criminals, punks, and B-boys. It contains pieces from renowned writers like Luc Sante, Richard Meltzer and Tom Robbins but (perhaps reflecting New York’s pre-Giulliani democratic essence) gives the same weight to downtown low-lifes: There is the former graffiti writer who reflects on his and the city’s past during his morning commute on the now impossible-to-tag subway system. While the book mourns the loss of the seedy underbelly that gave New York of the 70s and 80s its creative power whilst keeping the yuppies at bay, it is not all doom and gloom. Manhattan’s pre-gentrified soul has now moved to the outer boroughs, and there are great pieces celebrating this revival. - ADD TO CART
NOWTOPIA; How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! Chris Carlsson ( AK Press, $18.95) There’s a current in the eco movement that shopping ‘green’ will somehow preserve the earth, as if just shifting how we consume is going to be enough. As one of the founders of Critical Mass, Carlsson is a long time local community activist who believes that true change will only emerge when people shift their behavior away from eco-consumption or market based lifestyle choices. Nowtopia embodies a movement of people looking to create new ways of existing outside of the confines of the market. The practices outlined embody a real challenge to the accepted realities of modern life, reshaping our assumptions about science, technology, and human potential. In ways as diverse as urban permaculture, biofuels, open source coding, even the Burning Man festival, people are taking back their time and technological know-how from the market. Nowtopia outlines an ecologically driven and community based idea of politics propelled by the people who are farming vacant-lots in West Oakland or running community bike kitchens in Los Angeles. - ADD TO CART	Origins: A Memoir Amin Maalouf ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.00) Amin Maalouf's father died on the same date as his paternal grandfather. This seemingly insignificant coincidence changes Maalouf years later. Once a man content with, yet suspicious of his oral family history, he becomes determined to sift through every family story and letter to discover the true history of his paternal grandfather, Boutros. Spanning some fifty years and journeying from a Christian village in Lebanon, to politically chaotic Havana, Cuba, author Amin Maalouf lovingly and proudly narrates the lost history of his grandfather Boutros's life. - ADD TO CART
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape Raja Shehadeh ( Scribner, $15.00) Like many of us in the Bay Area, Raja Shehadeh loves to ramble in the hills and valleys that surround his home. Because he is Palestinian, and his home is the West Bank city of Ramallah, his walks are considerably more fraught with the weight of history than ours. This lovely, moving and original book is an account of six such walks, taken over the past quarter century, as the landscape of his childhood changed beyond recognition. An attentive and observant walker, he introduces us to the subtle variations of flora and fauna, of terraced hills and pastureland, in a landscape so often described by Western observers as barren wasteland. And he shows how that landscape is steadily transformed by Israeli settlements and the Israeli-only highways that lead to them, which are making that desert “bloom” with concrete and neon. Though it is suffused with dignified outrage, this is not at all a diatribe. Instead, Shehadeh gently leads us away from the abstractions and stereotypes that typify most discussions of this heart-rending land dispute and invites us to experience the land itself, the way it looks and smells, the way it feels under his hiking boots. If you think that everything that can be said about the topic has been said, you will find his book a revelation. - ADD TO CART	Serve the People! Yan Lianke ( Black Cat Press, $14.00) Serve the People! is a satire of life in China during the Cultural Revolution.It was banned in China by the Central Propaganda Bureau. Yan Lianke's novel centers around Wu Dawang, a dedicated sergeant in the army, who longs for promotion. Wu Dawang, who gains notice for being a model soldier and an excellent cook, is assigned to be the General Orderly for the Division Commander. His days are filled with the tireless duty of caring for the Division Commander's home and preparing the meals. His order is upset by Liu Lian, the Commander's young wife. When her husband is away on a lengthy assignment, she conspires to lead Wu Dawang into an affair. The affair starts as a twist on the Maoist Motto "Serve the People!" as Wu Dawang begins servicing Liu Lian. After one of their encounters, Wu Dawang accidentally breaks a plaster bust of Chairman Mao. Erotically charged by the accident, the couple then explores other acts of desecrating communist symbols, leading to consequences for everyone involved. - ADD TO CART
Shadow of the Silk Road Colin Thubron ( HarperCollins Publishers, paperback, $15.95) As Colin Thubron recounts his travels from Xi'an China to Antakya, Turkey one realizes that the sort of traveling he does is becoming a lost art. The roads he travels are bumpy or non-existent, but that isnï¿½t really what interests him. His gift lies in telling us little about himself, while observing and listening to the people he meets. On his own throughout his trip, his encounters with locals form the heart of his experience. Thubron is looking for traces of the Silk Road that have been all but lost to history. Making repeated inquiries he finds out about ruined caravansary in the desert. He tracks down descendents of a Roman army that made its way into present day Xinjiang in western China 2000 years ago. But he finds more than these traces of history. He experiences the political climate on a local scale through the lives of those he meets along his way. The repression of the authoritarian regimes and the economic and political instability affects everyone and is the source of much story-telling. Tubron offers up these fleeting glimpses in a region of shifting borders, allegiances and histories. - ADD TO CART	Stairway Walks in San Francisco 6th Ed Adah Bakalinsky ( Wilderness Press, $16.95) Over 350 stairways traverse San Francisco's 42 hills, linking diverse neighborhoods and offering inspiring vistas. Absorb the sights, scents, and sounds of San Francisco on 27 stairway walks. In this sixth edition of Stairway Walks in San Francisco, you'll find up-to-date architectural, historical, and horticultural information for each walk. Easy-to-follow maps correspond to lucid directions, including public transportation. - ADD TO CART
Street World; Urban Art from Five Continents Roger Gastmen, et. al. ( Abrams, $35.00) This fascinating compendium of images from international youth subcultures covers everything from punk in the Philippines to Russian biker gangs to ubiquitous NYC graffiti crews. The scope of this book is vast, though obviously it focuses on street art, which includes graffiti on all five continents as well as the vivid commercial signage for Jamaican music stands and Indian markets. There are images of kids united by soccer in a post war scarred Serbia, alongside the building of an illegal concrete skate park, girls who cover parking meter stands with knitted covers and guerilla gardeners who garden unkept urban areas by night. It is fascinating to see how the American idea of youth and rebellion changes and shifts as it is adopted by youth in different cultures and countries, each kid making their own idea of youth culture out of the ephemera of hair metal, James Dean, punk rock and hip hop. - ADD TO CART	The Bottom of the Harbor Joseph Mitchell ( Pantheon, hardback, $24.00) These days, virtually all travel literature has an underlying current of what might be called anticipatory nostalgia: the nagging awareness that whatever the author describes is about to be blown away by the gale winds of cultural globalization. This was not the case 50 years ago when Joseph Mitchell wrote these pieces about the New York harbor. The harbor seemed immutable; after all wasn't the city built around it? Yet Mitchell wrote as if he was trying to hold and preserve something precious, and now that the way of life he recorded has vanished, it is clear that he succeeded. He was particularly attracted to the people who worked the harbor, their skills, their tools, their superstitions, and especially their talk. Mitchell was a world-class listener. In one essay, he walks through the cemetery of a community of freed slaves who settled as oystermen on Staten Island, along with one of the last survivors, whose memories of the people under the headstones stretch back to the 19th century. This collection is a must-read for any lover of New York, of great writing, or both. - ADD TO CART
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food Jennifer 8. Lee ( Twelve, $24.99) Most of the food served in Chinese restaurants was never cooked or eaten in Chinese kitchens. It is a unique cuisine that evolved entirely within the context of expanding restaurant industry in America. This artificial construct has spread as globally as McDonald’s; so we find “American fortune cookies” sweeping Hong Kong, and “American chop suey” as a food craze in India. The Chinese restaurant industry is one of the weirder flowerings of transculturalism. It began when Chinese immigrants in California, who could only find work in restaurants and laundries because cooking and cleaning were “women’s work,” tried to devise something that would overcome the white populaton’s antipathy to Chinese culture. Its expansion was partially fueled (in another twist of transcultural weirdness) when American Jews adopted Chinese restaurant-going as a weekly ritual. Jennifer 8. Lee doesn’t ignore the underside of the story (like the global trade in low-wage restaurant workers); but mostly she keeps her tone light, and uses tricky hooks (like tracking down the first restaurant to produce “General Tso’s chicken”) to move her story along. You might call it the lighter side of globalization; but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the subject is so fascinating and suggestive. - Michael Rosenthal - ADD TO CART	The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed Michael Meyer ( Walker & Co., $25.99) As China prepares for the Olympics, stories abound about the transformation of the Chinese capital into a modern, efficient city. High rises, shopping centers and eight lane boulevards are rising out of a fictive nowhere. In Michael Meyer’s wonderful new book, this transformation by bureaucratic fiat has very real consequences on the residents of the old hutong (narrow lane) neighborhoods that are the traditional core of Beijing. Meyer, who lives in a crumbling hutong southwest of Tiananmen Square, is a witness to the encroaching destruction of his surrounding neighborhoods. Literally overnight, chai (“to be razed”) notices put up by a nameless/faceless system work their way through the old districts like an out of control oil spill. This is not a carefully planned Haussmannian makeover, but a hodge-podge scramble for development rights and quick profits. Meyer doesn’t romanticize the hutong housing; four pit toilets for over 1000 residents, no hot water and coal braziers for heating. Even the residents complain. It is the “…intangible social patterns” that make the hutong unique and so different from the high rise apartment blocks. “They did not…witness how even small fissures – a new road; the eviction of a few families – led to irreparable fractures.” By introducing us to his neighbors and daily encounters Meyer humanizes this enormous upheaval that has already displaced more than 500,000 people in Beijing. - ADD TO CART
The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolano ( Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, paperback, $15.00) Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003, and whose major works are only now being translated, has been increasingly acclaimed as the most important and original voice to emerge from the generation of Latin American writers who came of age after the magical realist “boom.” Nothing could be further from the villages of magical realism than Bolano’s Mexico City of the mid 70’s, a dingy, jivey, ultra-urban place reproduced as lovingly as Joyce’s Dublin (a conscious model). And nothing could be further from florid rhetoric than Bolano’s combination of vernacular storytelling, pop slang and high theory. The Savage Detectives is an epic, sprawling over time (following two poets from an avant-garde splinter group from the 70’s through the 90’s) and over space (as they search for a legendary poet of an earlier generation across the Sonoran Desert.) Bolano’s imaginary world is a recognizable but somewhat alternate universe in which everybody is either a writer or wannabe writer (which is, come to think of it, not that different from San Francisco). This does not mean they live in a world of otherwordly refinement. Like all Latin Americans, they suffer through history. Violence befalls them accidentally and arbitrarily, and their worst enemies are time and the dying of their hopes. This guy is the real deal: a truly great writer. - ADD TO CART	The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands Jeremy Salt ( University of California Press, $29.95) This elegantly written volume tackles the construction of the “west”- in fact the idea of civilization itself, and how both of these concepts have shaped, transformed and devastated what we know as the Middle East. The book is built around critical episodes in the modern history of the Middle East, starting with the borders imposed by the French and the British that marked both the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the disruption of the nomadic Arab routes; concluding with the quagmire of the Iraq, and possibly Iran. Salt’s writing is at once sharp and illuminating and he is able to communicate vast tracts of history and the complexities of regional politics and culture with clarity and insight. - ADD TO CART
Yalo Elias Khoury ( Archipelago Books, $25.00) Khoury’s novel opens in the middle of the interrogation of Yalo, a Beiruti war criminal accused of rape, arms trafficking and planting bombs. As we read on, the story comes into focus through a series of forced confessions, as Yalo alternately denies and admits to the crimes. His story, like the city he inhabits, is repeatedly torn down and reinvented. As the pieces fill in, we get a better idea of Yalo’s and his country’s history, but any absolute truth remains elusive. The novel is at first somewhat confounding, but quickly becomes quite engaging as we assemble the pieces of Yalo’s story. Any clear-cut answers are not laid out for the reader however; whether Yalo is a violent criminal or a pitiful victim of the war and the abuses of his countrymen is left to the reader to ponder. - ADD TO CART