Quality Books

Books about India

V.S. Naipaul's A Million Mutinies Now is one that I'm reading now (9/3/02). Naipaul is the son of Indians who went to Trinidad as indentured servants at the end of the 19th century. He makes the comparison that in Trinidad, there was such a thing as an "Indian" identity, whereas he found that in India there are too many people, too many Indian subcultures, for there to really be any overarching "Indian" identity. He then proceeds to tell the story of the country by interviewing people and learning about their individual worlds: the Bollywood screenwriter, a mafia don, a poet, a holy man. Through an accumulation of these little slices of life, Naipaul constructs an image of India that is sometimes exuberant, sometimes desperate and poor, but always very wild and colorful.

Books about India I hope to read:

Wolpert, Stanley. India
Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India
Gurcharan, Das. India Unbound
Mehta, Gita. Snakes and Ladders

Books on China

Well, haven't really read any yet, but two I hope to read are:

Hessler, Peter River Town This is one that I've ordered, so I'm definitely going to read it; it's about a couple of guys working in the Peace Corps on the banks of the Yangtze in Sichan province, and was recommended to me by a coworker.

Booz, Patrick. Yunnan

Books about the Middle East

Tired of learning about the Middle East only from CNN? Check these out:

"What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process". This history and Analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by an American Jew named Jerome Slater. He finds that most of the responsibility for the situation lies with Israel and her sponsor, the United States, not being truly sincere in their desire for peace. To support his point (among other sources) he analyzes of the Camp David summit of 2000, and uses the personal correspondence of David Ben Gurion around the time of the founding of Israel.

There are several good articles that we re-relased online in the wake of the September 11th attack by the journal Foreign Affairs. You can take a look at the whole list for yourself (note 9/3/2002 that I've found alternate links as FA now only has 500 word previews), but two that I have thus far found enlightening were:

Ahmed Rashid on the Taliban, and how they have been encouraged to seek more power than merely ruling Afganistan by bin Laden and other Pakistani and Saudi backers. In the process, they have been destabilizing the region with their two main economic activities: heroin production and smuggling.
Samuel Huntington's 1993 article "The Clash of Civilizations?" theorizes that instead of the clashes over ideology of the past, the most likely conflicts coming up will be along cultural faultlines. He makes an interesting contrast between the Spanish Civil war, where the governments that intervened did so to promote communism, fascism, and democracy, and the conflict of the early '90's in the Balkans, where the Croatians, Serbs, and Muslims were backed respectively by European governments, Russia, and Iran, because of cultural and religious ties.

For older history of how the British mucked with the whole region, impacting what countries even existed in the first place, read David Fromkin's A Peace To End All Peace. Through painstaking research and reading through diaries and correspondence of Churchill, Gilbert Clayton, Sir Mark Sykes, and others, he demonstrates how a few men plotted and schemed to use the Middle East to the advantage of the British Empire in the First World War. Whether or not they succeeded is open to debate, but they sure did mess the place up in the process. I've also read, since my return, Fromkin's In the Time of the Americans and The Way of the World, and they are both spectacular.

Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map is based on his experiences covering the Middle East as a journalist in the early 1990's. You get to see as he matures as a journalist, sometimes returning to the same place twice, such as Iraq first as your average Islamic dictatorship circa 1988 and then several years later on the eve of Desert Storm. Usually funny, he is also grim when it's called for -- there's nothing funny about the Iran-Iraq war, for example -- this slim volume leaves you with the distilled essence of what it was like to be at the major recent events in the Middle East.