Book Review: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by Bell Hooks

 Bell Hooks says that militant feminism gave women permission to unleash their rage and hatred at men but it did not allow us to talk about what it meant to love men in patriarchal culture, to know how we could express that love without fear of exploitation and oppression. To simply label men as oppressors and dismiss them meant we never had to give voice to the gaps in our understanding or to talk about maleness in complex ways. She believes...

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Book Review: Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

 Power is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants. This can be done through coerce by threats, induce them with payments or through attraction and co-option. Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your...

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Book Review: One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse

 In 1940s there were two tendencies within the history of Critical Theory. First, the philosophical-cultural analysis of the trends of Western civilization developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Second, the more practical-political development of Critical Theory as a theory of social change proposed by Marcuse and Neumann. For them, Critical Theory would be developed as a theory of social change that would connect...

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Book Review: Bhopal Connections Vignettes of Royal Rule by Shaharyar Muhammed Khan

 Khan, the grandson of the last ruling Nawab of Bhopal writes about the dramatic events, characters, scandals, social practices, culture and history of Bhopal. Specific attention has been given to the four successive women rulers of Bhopal. Some of the social customs are shown through the lens of foreigners including Badcock, and Marjorie Memsahib. The first part of the book covers the history of Bhopal and the second part covers the contemporary...

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Book Review: My Life's Journey: The Early Years (1966-1988) by Altaf Hussain

 Originally this book was published in Urdu as Safa-e-Zindagi. It was based on lengthy interview of Altaf Hussain, better known as Altaf bhai. In the foreword of the book Matthew A. Cook says that the Urdu speaking population which migrated to Pakistan includes population form Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan and Bombay. He also says that most Mohajirs were not elites. They were artisans such as shoemakers, carpet weavers from...

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Book Review: Iqbal by Francesco D'Adamo, Ann Leonori (Translator)

Iqbal is a fictional account about a person named Iqbal Masih who wanted to liberate bonded laborers in Pakistan. The narrator of this book is Fatima, a girl who was inspired by Iqbal’s courage and determination. As a sign of resistance Iqbal cut his master’s carpet with a knife. His master Hussain Khan punishes him. There are also other children who were taken away from their families and enslaved by Hussain Khan. Once Iqbal tries to escape, but...

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Book Review: Books V. Cigarettes by George Orwell

 This book was first published as an essay in 1940s. The author says that even if one buys books and periodicals, that does not cost more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking. Orwell shares his own experience of working at a secondhand book shop. He doubts whether ten percent of his customers at the bookshop are able to distinguish a good book from a bad one. Every month about a dozen books were stolen from the bookshop. Orwell states...

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Book Review: Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am so Wise translated by R.J. Hollingdale

 Nietzsche lived from 1844 to 1900. This book has been compiled by including excerpts from Ecce Homo and Twilight of the Idols. The author says that the overthrowing idols is his business. According to him, philosophy is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains- a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality. Nietzsche says: ‘It also seems to me that the rudest word,...

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Book Review: The Closed Valley: With Fierce Friends in the Pakistani Himalayas by Jurgen Wasim Frembgen

 Jurgen Wasim Frembgen is an anthropologist, who is one of the first to venture into the Harban valley. This book is an outcome of the authors several stays in the valley between 1989 to 1997. Frembgen explores the life of the mountain people in Kohistan region of Pakistan. The Indus Kohistan district was created in 1976. In the first chapter he mentions that the Indus River is locally known as Aba Sin (Father of Rivers). In ancient Indian...

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Book Review: The Secret Annexe from the diary of Anne Frank By Anne Frank

 Anne was born in Frankfurt on 12 June 1929. She died in a camp because of typhoid and exhaustion, just three months short of her sixteenth birthday. Anne Frank’s diary was kept from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944. She provides an important eyewitness account of the events during the Second World War. The Secret Annexe begins on 10th of November 1942, when Anne frank and her family spent more than a year in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam....

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Book Review: Money by Yuval Noah Harari

 Harari was born in Israel in 1976. He studied at Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the Middle Ages and World History. In this book the author starts with the history of money. He says that hunter-gatherers shared their goods and services through an economy of favors and obligations. Each village was a self-sufficient economic unit, maintained by mutual favors and obligations with a little barter trade...

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Book Review: The Storm's Call for Prayers: Selections from Shaikh Ayaz by Shaikh Ayaz, Asif Farrukhi (Translator) and Shah Mohammed Pirzada (Translator)

 This book presents an English translation of some of the selected works of Shaikh Ayaz, the renowned poet from Sind. Ayaz was born in 1923 in Shikarpur. Throughout his life Ayaz was faced numerous challenges. He was banned by the government, imprisoned and declared a traitor. Later, he was also given Sitara-i-Imtiaz (an award by the government in recognition to his services). Initially, Shaikh Ayaz was a lawyer based in Sukkur. Later, during...

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Book Review: Dawood's Mentor by S. Hussain Zaidi

 The author believes that Khalid Khan Pehelwan played a very important role in making Dawood the mafia mobster of India. He also states that Dawood owed his life and power to this man. Khalid’s ancestors migrated from Batkhela in the present day Malakand Agency of Pakistan. In the book, Zaidi covers the rise of Dawood Ibrahim in the crime world. He also traces how Dawood befriends Khalid. From school Dawood and his elder brother were notorious....

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Book Review: With Our Own Hands: A Celebration of Food and Life in the Pamir mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan by Frederik van Oudenhoven and Jamila Haider

 This co-authored book provides the description of the recipes of a longlist of dishes prepared in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It also gives details of the various days of celebrations in this region. I found many interesting points in this book. A day without Shirchoy in the Pamirs is impossible to imagine. Shirchoy isn’t from these valleys and tea cannot even be grown here. Shirchoy has become more Pamiri than most...

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Book Review: Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Kyrgyz Republic published by UNESCO

 This book provides brief and interesting information about the Kyrgyz way of life. It starts with the Akyns. These were the Kyrgyz epic tellers who combine singing, improvisation and musical composition. They were the figures who participated in story telling contests. The pre-eminent Kyrgyz epic is the 1000-year-old Manas trilogy which is known for its length (16 times longer the Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey). The Kyrgyz epic trilogy of Manas,...

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Book Review: Cities of the Dead: The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan by Nasser Rabbat, Elmira Kochumkulova and Altyn Kapalova

 I learn from this book that the Kyrgyz territory was formally incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1876. In Kyrgyz tradition the living does not visit the graves of the dead. There is a popular Kyrgyz saying that ‘a Kyrgyz is born in the yurt and will die in the yurt.’ Yurt is the traditional home of the nomadic Kyrgyz people Due to Stalin’s sedentarization policy the Kyrgyz and the other nomadic peoples of Central Asia were forced to give...

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