This book is about a corrupt official in Delhi, India who lives with this daughter and granddaughter.  Bumbling, ironical, sad, Ram Karan also had a guilty secret.  Sharma weaves the story of Ram with Indian politics after Rajiv gandhi, son of Indira Ghandi and soon to be prime minister is murdered.  Ram tries to protect himself and his family, despite the horrible way he's treated them.  He struggles to survive and to make amends after a life of deception.  This is not a lush and dreamy portrait of India, it shows what is underneath.  Ram Karan works among the rich and powerful, but lives in a slum. This is a story of corruption, both moral and political. Ram Karan is a self-pitying hedonist, and he knows it, even hates himself for it.

 

If you like world literature, this is a great book.

A vivid and thoughtful portrait of China by a Pulitzer Prize- winning husband-and-wife team of New York Times correspondents formerly in Beijing. Allowing for the complexity of the task, and for the sad record of China watchers (almost all of whom, for example, were unaware of the greatest man-made famine in history, which followed the so-called Great Leap Forward at the end of the 1950s and killed 30 million people), Kristof and WuDunn puzzle over the great paradox of present-day China: that, amid all the signs of a dying political dynasty, there flourishes one of the most buoyant economies in the world. The authors may not always be quite as skeptical of statistics as one would like, but this is a hard-headed, clear analysis filled with anecdote and vivid reportage.

In 1982, Salzman flew off to teach English in Changsha, China. He writes of bureaucrats, students and Cultural Revolution survivors, stripping none of their complexity and humanity. He's gentle with their idiocies, saving his sharpest barbs for himself (it's his pants that split from zipper to waist whilst demonstrating martial arts in Canton). Though dribs of history and drabs of classical lore seep through, this is mostly a personal tale, noted by the Los Angeles Times for "the charmingly unpretentious manner in which it penetrates a China inaccessible to other foreigners."

Peter Maass went to the Balkans as a reporter at the height of the nightmarish war there, but this book is not traditional war reportage. Maass examines how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor, once a friend--then rape that neighbor's wife. He conveys the desperation that makes a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city in order to end the misery. And Maass does not falter at the spectacle of U.N. soldiers shining searchlights on fleeing refugees--who are promptly gunned down by snipers waiting in the darkness. Love Thy Neighbor gives us an unflinching vision of a late-20th-century hell that is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. Like Michael Herr's Dispatches (also available in Vintage paperback), it is an utterly gripping book that will move and instruct readers for years to come.

An outstanding book.  It's a collection of stories about a bunch of different people sharing their experiences with World War II, loving America for what she stands for, and giving an emotional voice to the often not-talked-about War.  It really gives a great perspective of the people of the World War II generation...something we should all read.

 

--Jen