Worth reading book review by Jake Lamar.

Whatever Pakistan’s faults, the war on terror only further rent its fragile social fabric. In “Osama bin Laden’s Death,” Hamid writes: “Crowds are justifiably celebrating bin Laden’s death in downtown Manhattan, where a decade ago al-Qaeda terrorists infamously massacred nearly three thousand people. But since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed many times that number of people in Pakistan. Tens of thousands have died in terror and counterterror violence, slain by bombs, bullets, cannons, and drones. America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24/7/365.”

One could say, with no snark intended, that back in the year 2000, twenty-nine-year-old Mohsin Hamid was the ultimate bourgeois bohemian. He had just published a well-received first novel. He lived on lovely Cornelia Street, in a corner of the West Village once inhabited by artists and writers but, by the dawn of the twenty-first century, affordable mainly to investment bankers and management consultants. As it happened, this debut novelist was also a management consultant. And in a deal of sugar-shock sweetness, his employer, McKinsey & Company—famous for overworking its bright young climbers—allowed this graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law three months off per year to write fiction. This guy, as Frank Sinatra might have crooned, had the world on a string, the string around his finger.

But even back then, before the twin towers came tumbling down, Hamid felt the sting of Islamophobia in New York City. In “International Relations,” one of the many superb pieces in his first collection of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations, Hamid describes how he was made to squirm every time he went to the Italian consulate in Manhattan to receive official clearance to visit his then-girlfriend in her European homeland. Hamid’s passport “runs suspiciously backward, the right-hand cover its front, and above the curved swords of its Urdu lettering . . . reads, ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan.’ Words to make a visa officer tremble.”

For Hamid, life in the Big Apple would turn sour fast. As he writes in another essay: “The 9/11 attacks placed great strain on the hyphen bridging that identity called Muslim-American. As a man not known for frequenting mosques, and not possessing a US passport, I should not have felt it. But I did, deeply. It seemed two halves of myself were suddenly at war.” He arranged to have McKinsey transfer him, indefinitely, to London. All was well there, at least for a while: “Like many Bush-era self-exiles from the United States, I found that London combined much of what first attracted me to New York with a freedom America seemed to have lost in the paranoid years after 9/11.” In London, Hamid met the love of his life: “She and I had been born on the same street in Lahore.” He quit McKinsey. He published his mesmerizing second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which became an internationally acclaimed best seller. Marching with a million other people in Hyde Park to protest the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hamid thought: “I am one of them. I am a Londoner.”

http://bookforum.com/inprint/021_05/14162

Posted By F.Sheikh

> On Jan 27, 2015, at 18:41, editors@thinkersforumusablog.org wrote:
>
>
> Subject: book review
> From:    “shoeb amin”
> Date:    Tue, January 27, 2015 8:59 am
>
> BOOK REVIEW
> Name: Being Mortal
> Author: Atul Gawande, MDPublisher: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt
> Co.,LLCISBN: 9780805095159
> What should one do when faced with a terminal illness when routine
> treatments are either not available or have not worked? Should one go on
> and take drastic measures, no matter what the cost, side effects and go
> through at least temporary hell? Or should one accept the inevitable and
> spend the rest of the time left doing what is important? In other words do
> you choose to add years (or months) to your life or to keep life in your
> remaining years.
> And what are one’s choices when one is old and unable to care for him or
> her self? What are the choices besides a traditional nursing home?
> These are some of the questions this book wrestles with. The author is a
> surgeon out of Boston who is known for his other book “Checklist
> Manifesto” in which he proposed solutions to minimize errors in the
> medical field.
> The book describes the evolution of hospitals, nursing homes, assisted
> living facilities; how they were originally devised as a solution to an
> existing problem and how they became money making machines with no
> consideration for what the “residents” in those facilities most wanted.
> The author then goes on to describe people who came with clever and
> simple  ideas; how they bent the rules to improve the lot of the
> residents.
> The author seems to practice what he tries to preach in this book; He
> details a very personal story of his own father, who was also a doctor,
> who in his seventies was diagnosed with a rare spinal cord tumor. His
> choices were grim; surgical treatment carried the risk of quadriplegia; no
> treatment could lead to the same. Their decision making process, which
> focuses mostly on how to add life to his years is interesting.
> Some readers might find the book depressing because it lists a lot of
> cases of folks with terrible illnesses. But one gain a new perspective as
> to how to handle such asituation if one is faced with such a situation.
> Shoeb Amin
> <untitled-[2].html>

Subject: Re: [Fwd: book review]
From:    “Nasik Elahi”
Date:    Thu, January 29, 2015 10:29 pm

End of life is an issue most of us avoid until such time as disease or
events force us to confront.  DNR – do not resuscitate – is one of the
more popular modern  refrains.  It is an expression of the limits a body
should undergo to sustain the illusion of life by modern scientific means.
I had the occasion to exercise such judgment for my late sister a few
years ago and hope that my family will extend a similar judgment on my
behalf.  It is a painful choice and dr Atul Gawande does well in his book
to raise public awareness of an issue we all have to face.

Nasik elahi

BOOK REVIEW

The book review category on the TF has not been used so far and i’d like to start with a review of a book I read recently. It is a book which is a “must read” for all students of law schools. This is a book about how a poor prisoner radically changed the justice system of the USA.

I hope more people will share their thoughts on what they have read recently; kind of have a virtual book club.

Shoeb Amin

Name of book: Gideon’s Trumpet

Author: Anthony Lewis

It is hard to imagine that as recent as 1962, if you were to stand trial for a felony and you were poor and could not afford an attorney, you had two choices. You either acted as your own attorney or you had to find a lawyer who would defend you pro bono.

And then came Clarence Earl Gideon. Gideon was a poor Florida man who had been in and out of jobs, in and out of jails, in and out of relationships and in and out of residences; essentially a bum. He was charged for illegally entering and stealing from a club. Being poor, he could not afford a lawyer. At his trial he asked the judge to appoint a lawyer for his defense; the judge refused based on the current State law. Gideon was convicted and sent to jail for one more time. From his jail cell he had the nerve to write a petition to the Supreme Court of the US. As luck would have it his petition – out of the hundreds received by the Supreme Court – was accepted. His case was assigned to a top lawyer, Abe Fortas, who took it on without getting paid.

The book describes the path Gideon’s petition takes in great detail from the secretary who opens the mail on through all the steps before reaching the Chief Justices, their deliberations, the oral arguments and finally their landmark decision.

The book is a great window into how the judicial system works; some may find it too technical. It describes how the law that was in effect until then came into being, how it had been challenged at both the appellate level and in the Supreme Court.

The law existing at the time offered the right to a “public defender” only in cases of murder and other major crimes, not for all felony cases. One of the main reasons it was not offered in minor felony cases was the worry that it would be too expensive. But those justices finally took the expense out of the equation and unanimously changed the law for all states to follow. Some fifty years later it is hard to imagine a citizen did not have a right that we now consider so basic. Could we be wondering the same 50 years from now that there were people who were trying to deny citizens another basic right – that of health insurance because it was too expensive?

All in all, Gideon’s Trumpet is a fascinating read.