How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid

A fast read but it operates on many levels.  Set in Pakistan, it follows the life journey of a boy from a village who moves to the city and makes it big.  It is  his story, divided into chapters based on the author's overriding concept of a self-help book for becoming rich (as the title says...) with each chapter devoted to a particular piece of advice or strategy, such as "Get and Education", "Don't Fall in Love", "Be Prepared to Use Violence", etc.  Each chapter is an illustration of the importance of each self-help principal.
It is all set amidst a rather tongue-in-cheek introduction to the perils and curiosities of the self-help genre.  Interwoven is a wistful mostly unrequited love story that remains somehow sad.  The story of the main character's lives is the Chase, followed by Loss.
Interspersed are witty little comments and asides that provide glimpses of the frustrations, craziness, and pressures of life in modern Pakistan.
An heavy book recounted in a light and traipsing town.
Worth a reread.

The Great War for Civilization - Robert Fisk

A book by a reporter who has covered every major and minor war and conflict in the Middle east for decades.  A sickening and depressing look at what went on in Iraq (twice), Algeria (twice), Palestine, Armenia, Afghanistan.  He looks at corruption in U.S. policy, European government policy, Middle-eastern government policy.  He looks at the role of the Saudis in the region.

He catalogues both high level corruption and the sad story of the effects of all of this on the little people in these societies.

Then of course, there are the accounts of the three interviews he did with Osama Bin Ladin - I believe the only journalist from the West to interview Bin Ladin, and certainly the only one to be invited by Bin Ladin to do the interview.

Having witnessed all of that, I don't understand how he can continue on and not be crushed by all the horror and injustice he has witnessed.

Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Ventures to the Vikings - Jean Manco

A look at population movements and migration through the records in ancient and modern genetic material.  This is a fascinating approach to ancient prehistory.  The detailed discussion of haploids, y-chromosomes etc. and be a bit confusing or hard to follow in detail, but the discussion of what this rather technical evidence shows is done in clear, easy to follow language.  There are all kinds of little tidbits:

- the Celts seem to be associated particularly with iron work, and seem to have spread in scattered clusters all over Europe, settling in areas with good resources for iron work and other metal work.

- the population of a settled region does not remain constant; population levels rise and fall significantly based partly on weather patterns and long-term climate fluctuations
- in this way, the Indo-europeans seem to have initially entered Europe at a time when population levels in eastern Europe were quite low - this brings into question the whole idea of the Indo-eurpoeans invading and destroying the Old Europe culture that was highly developed in eastern Europe before the I-E's arrival - there is some evidence for shrinking population in Old Europe in the period preceding the I-E's arrival.

- many things can affect climate change - the bursting of a huge glacial lake in North America and the outflow of huge quantities of cold water into the Atlantic sparked a noticeably climate shift in Europe that lasted for at least 100 years!

The Mediterranean in the Ancient World - Fernand Braudel (1998)

An interesting idea, probably quite new at the time of publication but this books seems a bit outdated now somehow.  Braudel was near the end of his career when this book was published, so he has an older approach to history, a more personally interpretive approach -which can be interesting, granted, but the facts on the ground have changed some since the writing I think.  The narrative is quite personal; you sense the value judgements and personal biases in the recounting, and this rather puts me off due to the assumed superiorities, cultural or otherwise.  There seems to have been a revolution in accessing and processing data in the historical research process and this has shifted the style of writing and also interpretation.
Didn't read the whole book but looked through the chapter especially on the 12th century B.C. which saw the appearance of the Indo-europeans in Greece, the fall of the Hittite, Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations and the appearance of the mysterious Sea Raiders. Was it climate shift? Was it invasion? Was it mass migration to greener pastures?  The evidence seems to remain inconclusive.

Les héritiers de la mine - Jocelyne Saucier

Un roman qui se déroule au nord de Québec dans la région minière.  Il raconte l'histoire d'une famille nombreuse - chaque chapitre est raconté par un différent membre de la famille, mais ça prend deux ou trois chapitres avant de comprendre cela.  Le centre du roman est la mort d'Angèle, un membre de la famille, dans une mine abandonnée qui a de l'importance dans l'histoire de la famille.  Angèle a  toujours était différente de la reste de la famille, plus fine, plus sophistiquée, plus attirée par le monde hors de leur petit bled au fond de la forêt, et à cause de ces différences elle n'a pas été bien acceptée par les autres de la famille.
C'est comme un trou ou un mystère au long du livre, cette mort.

Thème du livre?  Les rapports familiaux? Les fils du pouvoir et dominance dans la famille?

Pas mal, comme livre.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid

A short but very intense novel.  Well-crafted book built on a long monologue conversation in a market in Lahore between a Pakistani former New York financial analyst and what appears to be a CIA agent, though this is never made clear.

It explores issues that came up around the 9/11 event - the role of the US internationally and Corporate America's economic and social effect on countries around the world.  Through his time in Princeton and on Wall Street, he presents a social picture of the upper financial stratum of the US and both its privileged position and the privileges it takes for granted as its right.  This analysis is critical but subtle - worth reflecting on.  There is also an attempt to draw awareness to the kinds of stereotyped images in the US media of other countries around the world and what life is like there.

A subtle book - rare, so worth rereading.

Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution - Neil deGrasse Tyson/ Donald Goldsmith

An easy book to read about a complex subject.  Very well-divided into chapters that focus on particular questions or issues around origins:  the universe, galaxies, stars, planets, life.  There are also a couple of chapters on the possibility and the search for life elsewhere in the universe.  He also includes an interesting chapter on matter and antimatter, and dark matter and energy.  You get a sense of the big pictures and also the ongoing unresolved questions or issues in this domaine.

Lots of interesting facts to pick up:

Living things are made largely of the most common elements in the universe, which differ completely from the most common elements on earth.  This is considered one possible argument for life beginning outside earth and being "seeded" here, but is by no means a final argument.

A great explanation of how stars create those most common elements in the universe through fusion of progressively more complex molecules, up to iron.  Once you hit iron, more energy is consumed in the fusion than is produced, leading to a collapse of the star, a huge rise in temperatures and a final explosive fusion as the star blows itself up.  In this last fusion all the other elements are created, but in much smaller amounts than iron and the preceding other elements.

Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga

This is the same author who wrote The White Tiger.

An excellent read - well-written, the characters are wonderfully developed and explored, the descriptive writing is very evocative.  The book is based around an aging co-op building in Mumbai and what happens when a real estate developer decides he wants to buy out the owners for a project.  Adiga does a wonderful job of charting the the path of the people in the coop from a group of rather ordinary people to a group of murderers driven by greed.  The underlying theme would seem to be how the corruption and greed of the developers creates a situation that destroys communities and families, and brings out the worst in people.  It is like an unmasking of the livable surface of people's lives, the ordinary small kindnesses and grudging acceptance of foibles that make a life, a community  - unmasked to reveal the ability for evil beneath that surface.
Not the first time that story has been told in the 20th or 21st century...

There are no heroes in the book.  One man, Masterji, holds that role at first in the book, but he too has his mask pulled away, in part at least.

Depressing, but an excellent read.