Review

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf was originally published in French in 1983. Maalouf, who comes from a Catholic family in Lebanon, was elected to the Académie française in 2011. I started this book after reading a chronicle about the Crusades by Hilaire Belloc, which I found fascinating. Maalouf’s work is equally good. […]

Spillover by David Quammen. The book discusses zoonotic diseases, which are illnesses that originate in wild animals and are transmitted to humans, often through an intermediate host species. In Africa, zoonotic diseases sometimes spread when people consume wild animals such as gorillas or chimpanzees. One notable example in the book is the Hendra virus outbreak

The Crusades by Hilaire Belloc. French-born British historian who wrote in the early 19th century, this book, first published in 1937, is fantastic. I’ve seen some criticism suggesting that Belloc’s Catholic upbringing heavily influenced his writing. However, from reading this book, I did not notice any religious undertones, either subtle or overt. One observation I

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Professor Gurnah, born in Tanzania, won the Nobel Prize in 2021. He teaches postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in the UK. This is a very unusual coming-of-age story. It begins when Yusuf, the main character, is about 11 years old. He is the younger child in a poor family

Disgrace by John W. Coetzee. This book hit me hard. It’s one of those novels that leaves you reeling. Another one that had a similar effect on me was “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. I remember feeling down for days after finishing it. “Disgrace” is all about things going terribly wrong. It asks the question: when

Destined for war: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s trap? by Graham Allison. Lately, I’ve been reading about current global conflicts, starting with “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” by John Mearsheimer and “Silent Invasion” by Hamilton Clive. Both authors are academics in the US and Australia, respectively, making their books well-crafted and thoroughly

Letters from Thailand by Botan is a book that takes place in 1948 and follows the journey of Tan Suan U, a young Chinese man who moved to Thailand in search of a better life. The novel is constructed through the letters Suan U writes to his mother back in China. Although it is far

The WEIRDest people in the world by Joseph Henrich. The author is professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. I learned about this fascinating book from a podcast featuring Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University. What caught my attention was his observation that highly educated people show differences not just at psychological level