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Jun. 23rd, 2009 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furyofvissarionBanker to the Poor: The Story of the Grameen Bank - Muhammad Yunus with Alan Jolis. The story of microcredit from the person who started it--or at least started the project that got microcredit the most attention internationally (I don't know if there were other precursors or not). I've read critiques of microcredit & while I think some of them are certainly valid, I still come down on the side of thinking that it does more good than harm. That said, of course this book will be very booster-y, given that Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Grameen Bank. While he does offer some critique of mistakes made, none of them tie into the critiques I've read.
I did think it was interesting to see how the Grameen Bank works on principes that are anathema to the right, as well as principles that are anathema to the left: so it's not really easily placed into a political category. Also, the accomplishments of the Bank in helping women (& their families, but they focused for a long time predominantly on women, & specifically the very poorest women at that) out of poverty do seem tremendous. Yunus can be a little condescending at times, while other times he pokes holes in the condescension of others towards the poor. I think the story of the Bank is interesting enough to withstand all but the most wretched writing; while I don't think this book would win any points for style, it's certainly more readable than I feared, & went pretty quickly. Chunks of this book do focus on Yunus' life, apart from/before the Bank, which I guess is fair enough & all contributes to the person he became that was moved to start the Bank. But I kind of wanted less Yunus, more of his customers.
Second-Class Citizen - Buchi Emecheta. I think I read this about 10 years ago--I know I read some Buchi Emecheta books at uni & the story was vaguely familiar. Anyway, I'm sure I got more out of this than I did then. It's the story of Adah, a Nigerian woman who moves to London with her husband, I guess in the '60s or early '70s (the book was originally published in 1974). Adah is oppressed by both the sexism of her husband & the racism of English society. In Adah's childhood, she seemed quite impish but determined, as she used her smarts to force her parents to send her to school. As she gets older & moves to London, you can really see her slowly getting worn down. Not giving up, but finding herself in more & more of a tight corner, especially as she has four children & becomes pregnant with another.
This wasn't an enlightening or uplifting book; I didn't finish it feeling like Adah would definitely triumph, & there are some very upsetting parts to the narrative. I think it tells a really important story, & I think more people should be aware of such stories, but yeah, not an easy read.
Ten Little Indians - Sherman Alexie. Wonderful, bitterly humorous stories about the Native American experience in Washington state. I don't even really have words to talk about how excellent these stories were, but again, I'm kind of wondering how I never managed to read Alexie until recently??
Strangers - Taichi Yamada, translated by Wayne P. Lammers. Harada is a TV scriptwriter living in Tokyo & sort of drifting through life after a divorce. One night he encounters his parents, who died when he was 12. This is a ghost story that felt much more interesting to me by the end than from the beginning; Harada irritated me as a man who just didn't seem to be bothered about his wife & son, for no reason at all; he wasn't sympathetic as a protagonist. His longing for his dead parents & his extreme joy at being able to spend time with them made him more interesting & more human. Sometimes I found the writing choppy & I wonder how much of that was the translation.
The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat. Another heartbreaker from Danticat; the title character is a quiet, hard-working Haitian immigrant in Brooklyn with a secret past: he used to torture & kill people for the government in Haiti. Shortly after the novel opens, his grown daughter discovers this, & that her mother's known about this for years.
The book has multiple viewpoints (some first & some third), showing the experiences of family members and victims of torture. I think having different narrators was a good idea, but something about the way it was executed sometimes confused me. That might be deliberate, as you're left to figure out who's changed names & how all these lives fit together. Danticat is really good at making you sympathize with someone you might normally, quite naturally, revile; she shows the complicated reasons people might become complicit with violence & how hard it can be to withdraw from such a life.
Walking a Tightrope: New writing from Asian Britain - Edited by Rehana Ahmed. YA anthology of Asian British writing; nothing super earthshaking but fulfilled my urge for easy, not too challenging (to read) YA short stories.
Sour Sweet - Timothy Mo. It's the '60s in London, & the Chens have come to Chinatown to make a living. I actually really grew to like Chen & his wife Lily, both sort of grumbly in general & to each other, & I was happy to read about their daily lives (different from Chinatown today, it seemed possible to support a family decently as a waiter). Unfortunately, like many Chinese, Chen becomes involved with local Chinese gangs. I really don't like reading about organized crime, because it makes me really sad, & I always end up reading anxiously, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No exception here; the more I grew to like the Chens the more nervous I became. I also really hate just reading about the posturing & rituals of organized crime, ugh. I found Mo's writing style witty & sharp, but even so I hated the parts featuring the criminal underworld. That storyline, & that of the Chens, stay far enough divergent for a while that you begin to hope that maybe Chen won't have to pay for his one financial moment of weakness. Who am I kidding? The ending was all the more depressing for that.
I did think it was interesting to see how the Grameen Bank works on principes that are anathema to the right, as well as principles that are anathema to the left: so it's not really easily placed into a political category. Also, the accomplishments of the Bank in helping women (& their families, but they focused for a long time predominantly on women, & specifically the very poorest women at that) out of poverty do seem tremendous. Yunus can be a little condescending at times, while other times he pokes holes in the condescension of others towards the poor. I think the story of the Bank is interesting enough to withstand all but the most wretched writing; while I don't think this book would win any points for style, it's certainly more readable than I feared, & went pretty quickly. Chunks of this book do focus on Yunus' life, apart from/before the Bank, which I guess is fair enough & all contributes to the person he became that was moved to start the Bank. But I kind of wanted less Yunus, more of his customers.
Second-Class Citizen - Buchi Emecheta. I think I read this about 10 years ago--I know I read some Buchi Emecheta books at uni & the story was vaguely familiar. Anyway, I'm sure I got more out of this than I did then. It's the story of Adah, a Nigerian woman who moves to London with her husband, I guess in the '60s or early '70s (the book was originally published in 1974). Adah is oppressed by both the sexism of her husband & the racism of English society. In Adah's childhood, she seemed quite impish but determined, as she used her smarts to force her parents to send her to school. As she gets older & moves to London, you can really see her slowly getting worn down. Not giving up, but finding herself in more & more of a tight corner, especially as she has four children & becomes pregnant with another.
This wasn't an enlightening or uplifting book; I didn't finish it feeling like Adah would definitely triumph, & there are some very upsetting parts to the narrative. I think it tells a really important story, & I think more people should be aware of such stories, but yeah, not an easy read.
Ten Little Indians - Sherman Alexie. Wonderful, bitterly humorous stories about the Native American experience in Washington state. I don't even really have words to talk about how excellent these stories were, but again, I'm kind of wondering how I never managed to read Alexie until recently??
Strangers - Taichi Yamada, translated by Wayne P. Lammers. Harada is a TV scriptwriter living in Tokyo & sort of drifting through life after a divorce. One night he encounters his parents, who died when he was 12. This is a ghost story that felt much more interesting to me by the end than from the beginning; Harada irritated me as a man who just didn't seem to be bothered about his wife & son, for no reason at all; he wasn't sympathetic as a protagonist. His longing for his dead parents & his extreme joy at being able to spend time with them made him more interesting & more human. Sometimes I found the writing choppy & I wonder how much of that was the translation.
The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat. Another heartbreaker from Danticat; the title character is a quiet, hard-working Haitian immigrant in Brooklyn with a secret past: he used to torture & kill people for the government in Haiti. Shortly after the novel opens, his grown daughter discovers this, & that her mother's known about this for years.
The book has multiple viewpoints (some first & some third), showing the experiences of family members and victims of torture. I think having different narrators was a good idea, but something about the way it was executed sometimes confused me. That might be deliberate, as you're left to figure out who's changed names & how all these lives fit together. Danticat is really good at making you sympathize with someone you might normally, quite naturally, revile; she shows the complicated reasons people might become complicit with violence & how hard it can be to withdraw from such a life.
Walking a Tightrope: New writing from Asian Britain - Edited by Rehana Ahmed. YA anthology of Asian British writing; nothing super earthshaking but fulfilled my urge for easy, not too challenging (to read) YA short stories.
Sour Sweet - Timothy Mo. It's the '60s in London, & the Chens have come to Chinatown to make a living. I actually really grew to like Chen & his wife Lily, both sort of grumbly in general & to each other, & I was happy to read about their daily lives (different from Chinatown today, it seemed possible to support a family decently as a waiter). Unfortunately, like many Chinese, Chen becomes involved with local Chinese gangs. I really don't like reading about organized crime, because it makes me really sad, & I always end up reading anxiously, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No exception here; the more I grew to like the Chens the more nervous I became. I also really hate just reading about the posturing & rituals of organized crime, ugh. I found Mo's writing style witty & sharp, but even so I hated the parts featuring the criminal underworld. That storyline, & that of the Chens, stay far enough divergent for a while that you begin to hope that maybe Chen won't have to pay for his one financial moment of weakness. Who am I kidding? The ending was all the more depressing for that.