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Showing posts from December, 2017

Omar El Akkad's American War - Review

It's a novel predicting a grim future where climate change and internal conflicts have caused tremendous damage. North and South are divided, not by the racial lines, but by the usage of fossil fuel, so severe the division is that a second Civil War starts in 2075 and ending in 2095, costing millions of people their lives in the process. Omar El Akkad's American War is written well, has good characters development, plot and fast moving story, and I felt while reading it that the writer has written this novel as a metaphor, pointing to the eerie similarities between our contemporary world in early 21st century with the mere six to eight decades in the future. The story of an innocent girl named Sara T. Chestnut (Sarat) and her family, suffered from the war's violence. A born curious and exploratory girl, who might in better condition could have become a great scientist or a writer, Sarat gets manipulated by war veteran man named Gaines, who utilizes his charm and eloque

The Lost City of the Monkey God - A True Story - by Douglas Preston - Review

I thought it would be a very different sort of book, like adrenaline pulsing adventure story. The Lost City of the Monkey God - A True Story by Douglas Preston turned out to have more nuanced actions but more thoughtful observations about the archaeological exploration, Honduran politics, academic squabbling and the terrible parasite based disease called Lieshmaniasis, a disease that the millions of people in bottom rung of the economic ladder have to face without generating much interests from the big pharmaceutical companies as less money to be made from researching and developing vaccines and other medicines combating this "poor" world disease. The author's exploration of the lost city in the La Mosquitia region of Honduras, along with archaeologists, film makers, photographers and military proctors, are well described, including the tremendous daily struggles that all of them had to go through. Historic accounts were given about the lost city, and earlier explore