The Hunger Games, Mockingjay and Catching Fire

An amazing trilogy by Suzanne Collins set in a post apocalyptic world where humans have been reduced to a single city state "The Capitol" and twelve slave "Districts". Capitols control over technology and more importantly communications lets it completely control the districts, going as far as to running an annual "hunger games". Hunger games are like The Survivor, but you die instead of just being voted out, and the players are picked from the children of the districts. The control of the Capitol is so complete that not only are districts forced to send their children to death year after year, but they are also forced to celebrate the games.

The premise of the book is horrifying, and as I started reading it I kept feeling that this is crazy, something like that can never happen. But in a surprisingly little time I found myself engrossed in the games, cheering some contestants, wishing death of others. On one hand, the book is clearly a work of fiction, there is no way something like that can ever happen in our world, but in other ways it hit close to home. One poignant scene is when a district child is in the capitol, and looks at a typical meal that is served - some meat, some cheese, some wine, some cake. He tallies in his head how long it will take someone to prepare a meal like that in his district. Hunt enough meat. Save enough meat so that you can trade some for cheese. A months salary for the wine. Probably 2 months worth of hunting to get enough money to trade for the cake. But that is not that far from the disparity in our world, just like that Hunger Games is a story of our world.

And that is the beauty of the books. Even with an outlandish setting far from anything that you can remotely identify with, they remain realistic and you cannot help getting emotionally involved with the characters. Even the people of the Capitol, you can almost feel some sympathy for them. They do horrible things, but they are as much a slave of the culture that they live in that it is really as heroic for them to stand against it, as it is for the people in the districts. For those who do not have the courage to fight, you can only be as unsympathetic for those in capitols as you are for those in the districts.

There were a few low spots, more like the nitpicking of a grouchy old man. I found the ending to be too fantastic even for the setting, and unsatisfying. The last book steadily climbs to a climax, and then in a style very reminiscent of Lord of The Rings, instead ending the story, says a slow good by to the reader rather than an abrupt adieu. While I loved the Lord of The Ring for that, here it just left me baffled. I thought it would have been better to have more narrative voices. You are on the edge of your seat wondering if your favorite character will live or die, and then you realize that the same character is narrating the story, so she must have lived though at least this scene.

Overall, highly recommended. All three books end with the closure of the plot, so you do not have to read the next one.

First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began

First off I have to admit that I approached this book as a lay person without any special background in Chemistry or Biology expecting to see something along the lines of a Brief History of Time.

Alas, First Life feels more like a thinly disguised text book and one that was written 20 years too early. First 150 or so pages just lay out the groundwork for the chemistry and are tedious to go through. The prose is like the boring history of magic teacher we all had in Hogwarts. Bunch of people discovering reactions, which to a lay person like me, seem very similar to each other. A big deal is made out of whether basic chemicals needed for life came from space or were synthesized on Earth, but "why" we care is not at all clear. From reading the text, it seems its pretty straightforward for them to be created on earth, and also pretty straightforward for them to be created in space, so lets just get on with the story shall we?

Another problem is that the final chapter of this story is still unwritten, which is why I say the book has been written 20 years too early. The book is basically the Author's proposal for how life started, you get very little context on how well his proposals are accepted by the broader community. The science itself far from approaching an answer, and so the proposal themselves are riddled with contradictions that a lay person like myself can hardly be expected to make sense of. For example, a bunch of necessary chemicals need acidic environment for synthesis, while another bunch of needed elements need alkaline conditions. Both of these chemicals are introduced at different points in the book, and the fact that they both need to appear together for life to start is glossed over.

Author keeps getting back to a piece of meteorite that he analyzed and a volcanic field in Russia that he visited. It gets old pretty quickly. There is only so much you can read about those two incidents. Also bugging are "more about this in Chapter X" where X is half a book away.

I am guessing people who have a background in Chemistry and Biology might find this book more interesting, its not really written for an average Joe.

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking

The best description for India Calling that I can think of is "Indians for Dummies", those three words describe both what is great about the book and what its limitations are. Its a great way to quickly learn about the India, its people, its customs and shared heritage, but always keeping in mind, that what you learn is only an approximation.

Indian emigre's usually are much more conservative than Indians back home. Their "Indian" values and customs stop evolving as soon as they leave India, so ironically enough when they go back to India, they usually find that Indians have progressed far while they still have a vision of India that is stuck in the past. Our author also suffers from this, since his version of India is from 1970's. His problems are compounded because his India of background in India was in the british influenced upperclass household that has as much in common with a average Indian as Paris Hilton with average American.

The book is basically a series of character portraits of a number of Indians. A long chapter on Ambani's seems out of place, it looks more like a piece for Vanity Fair rather than saying anything insightful about India. Moreover, that one chapter also undoes a major theme at the beginning of the book - that India in 1970's was a stifling place where to be successful you had to emigrate. Ambani's were contemporary of author's parents and brought up in much poorer circumstances, still they were able to reach epitome of success in India.

The most interesting parts of the books were little insights into Indian society, and a way of looking at them that I never did. The author is at his greatest when he talks about the individual and families, the "the family relations of guilt", "the vibration and madness that numbed one's sensitivity to oneself", "lightness of being without roots". At the other end of the spectrum, I thought he failed miserably when he tried to talk about the overarching conflicts and path of history and society. A section on Maoist insurgency is shallow, at times devolving into meaningless drivel you will expect in a liberal arts journal

"Just as the new self-confidence in India was nourishing a rediscovery of traditional ways, so, too, the individuation ushered in by modernity was, in fact, ..., a return to the past, to an older pattern of division known from the villages."

How any of it is relevant to realities of Maoist insurgency and mass killings is left to reader's imagination. Talking about corruption and Amabani's it seems that author was one of those "journalists covering the company were made part of the family". PR department of Reliance Industries could not have written a better profile of Mukesh Ambani.

For all the harsh words, I enjoyed reading the book. It broadens your horizons and shows you a different way of looking at things. Overall a pretty decent book.

Orson Scott Card: The Homecoming Series

Long, preachy, repetitive and unsatisfying. A shadow of Ender.

I just finished reading the The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card. It consists of 5 books, and is a bit preachy and biblical. Biblical should not be surprising as the books is heavily influenced by the Book of Mormon. The story is set in far future on a planet called Harmony. The humans on earth had killed each other some 40 million ago and made the planet inhabitable. The last remnant humans had migrated to Harmony, and set up a computer, called Oversoul, to rule over them, and make sure they do not kill each other again. The computer rules by making people stupid when they think of some technologies that might lead to planet wide wars. Its an interesting thought, the community has computers but no wheels. By all accounts, it was a good idea, humans on Harmony have lasted 40 million years, while humans on Earth only lasted 8000. In any case, the computer is now wearing down, and wants to go back to Earth, and recruits a family to make this happen.

The plot of the story revolves on the members of this family, some are "good", and some are "evil", and continuously working against each other and trying to subvert the will of the Oversoul. This is the theme through the 5 books, how the evil stays evil and and tries to subvert the good, and how good prevails against. There is an interesting twist provided by "Keeper of the Earth" which is like oversoul, but on Earth, and an order of magnitude more powerful. The first four books deal with the original family, and the recurring theme is the repeated cycle of jealousy and anger and bitterness, yes I get it that people are bad, I really do not need four books to get the point. The fifth promises to be more interesting, since the Keeper of the Earth is putting humanity to a final test, but the final denouement left me unsatisfied. Yes it solved the immediate crisis, but there was no lasting change to humanity, nothing to indicate that humanity can live in harmony for next 40 million (or even 100 years) in peace.

The series is classic Card. It has a lot of themes from the Enders saga. The same all powerful God-like computer, the nature of God, human will, control. How is a genetic change that makes you susceptible to commands of a computer any different from the same behavior caused by an innate faith in God. I just wish he made his point in three books rather than five.

Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Just finished reading this excellent book. In Indian minds African anti-apartheid struggle has a special place, because it was in South Africa that Mahatma Gandhi first experienced the injustice of colonialism and took his first steps towards fighting against it. As an Indian, we were always taught that this was an important incident in both South African and Indian history. From reading this book, apparently not so for South Africa. It may have been a transformational moment for Mahatma Gandhi, but not for African National Conference. In fact, at least Mr. Mandela was slightly anti-Indian in his early attitudes, fearing that they would usurp the blacks in the African freedom struggle.

Something else that I liked about the book was the detailed descriptions of how the non-white Africans were repressed in day to day lives. The book gives great insight into how an organization like ANC works, the nitti-gritty of the day to day management and organization of protests and rallies. This was a contrast from the Indian independence books and histories. Looking back, I do not really know exactly how the British repressed Indians. We all know of the few big highlights, like Jalllianwala Bagh massacre, but not so much about day to day lives of Indians under British rule. Also missing is the organizational details of Congress. We all know how Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, but we have no idea, how the message was conveyed to all the people all over India about the movement in absence of 24 hour news channels.

Long Walk To Freedom is rich in all these details, the shocking and unbelievable attitude of Afrikaners (the white ruling class of South Africa) towards blacks and repression, till so late in 20th century when it seemed all the rest of the world had left these things so far behind. Given all this, its even more amazing that Mr. Mandela espoused reconciliation with the former oppressors, and was even successful at it.

The book is also very personal, and traces the personal growth of Mr Mandela from a fiery youth who cared more about who got credit for a campaign rather than the results, to the great selfless statesman that the world knows now. From the person who started the military arm of ANC and was its first commander in chief, to the noble peace prize winning first president on South Africa responsible for the only country in Africa to peacefully integrate former colonist into the new black dominated order.

Overall a very educational book.

Book Review – Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy

I decided to read Freefall (by Joseph Stiglitz) after seeing a talk by the author. In the book Stiglitz promises to peel back the layers of causes responsible for the recent financial market collapse. When asked why the collapse happened most people will respond by saying banks were giving out mortgages to people who could not pay back. But Why? Because the incentives of the mortgage originators and bankers were flawed. But then the question is why did the market not respond to those flawed incentives and encourage firms that had the right incentive structure. Stiglitz frames the economic collapse in context of larger debate between Keynesian's and Monetarist's. His central claim is that since late 1970's Monetarist thought has been gaining the upper hand and the current crisis is the result.

The book starts off very crisply. Stiglitz invites you to listen to the story of the crisis and keeps you engaged even while going over parts of the story that you have already heard. He gives a comprehensive account of the crisis and I learned many things even though I considered my self well aware of the events. He castigates the political administrations starting from Regan's for dismantling the regulatory system which was ultimately responsible for the crisis.

While he is extremely critical of the bankers, regulators and politicians he seems to give the homeowners who took mortgages they could not afford a free pass. He never quite gets around to explaining how the american family who took the zero percent down, non recourse mortgage was the victim when they could just walk away from the home that they had no business owning in the first place. He seems to see no difference between the hardworking Americans who save for a down-payment and only buy homes they can afford and those who get the biggest house they can with nary a thought to finances.

He also latches on to ARM's as unequivocally bad and predatory which is not really true. He mentions them multiple times and faults Greenspan for encouraging them in a lecture. In an otherwise crisp and insightful narrative I felt a dissonance reading the simple minded rhetoric on ARM's. In an ARM the borrower takes on the interest rate risk and in return gets a lower cost for the loan. These mortgages are pretty common in many countries (like Canada) and they work as well as the fixed rate mortgages used to in America.

The above faults aside Stiglitz is spot on in his criticisms on how the stimulus has played out. Banks and their shareholders got too sweet a deal. He explains how all the reasons given on why banks and their shareholders are entitled the the tax payer largess are flawed. The Obama administration policies have failed to stop a crisis like this from recurring. The banks are still too big to fail, and thus enjoy the implicit government guarantees.

The only problem with the book is its length. After about half way through, I started feeling that the arguments and examples got repetitive. It felt like someone who has been ignored for years has finally been vindicated and now cannot stop saying "I told you so".

Overall, I would highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the financial crisis. It pairs really well with The Big Shot