Every Sunday afternoon in Kigali, Rwanda, the pool at the Mille-Collines Hotel is a gathering spot for government workers, wealthy Rwandans engaged in various trades, aid workers, journalists, foreign visitors, and enterprising prostitutes, who gather to drink, exchange news, gossip among themselves, and participate in the “vaguely surrealistic play being acted out at the pool.” The pool is, in many ways, a microcosm of life in Rwanda, illustrating the pressures and competing interests among various facets of society, all wanting to protect what they already have, at the very least, and, they hope, to increase their power, influence, or wealth.
Through these people who visit the pool, all of whom were real and who are described with their real names, Gil Courtemanche, a former journalist in Rwanda himself, boldly illustrates the growing resentments and fears which tear apart the fabric of society and lead to the genocide of almost a million Tutsi people in 1994.
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In what may be Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s most playful—and, perhaps, popular—novel, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a secondary school history teacher, views a film given to him by a colleague and discovers in the film an actor who looks exactly like him in every respect. Though the film was made five years before and the actor was wearing a mustache, the two men are identical otherwise. Tertuliano, a somewhat gloomy, divorced man, has always liked the routine of his solitary life, and though he is a daydreamer, he has never before acted on those dreams. When he sees his double, he is stunned. “One of us is a mistake,” he declares, and as he begins, typically, to overanalyze the situation and chat with himself about the fact that “never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time,” he finds himself wondering what it would be like to find and meet this double.
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In this warm and complex study of friendship, love, and roots, Kamila Shamsie focuses on the interrelationships of a group of vividly realized, upper-class residents of Karachi, particularly Raheen and Karim and their friends, only thirteen years old as the novel opens. Raheen has always regarded Karim, her one-time crib-companion and blood-brother, as her best friend, someone who knows her so well he can complete her sentences. Their parents, too, are close friends, and as the story evolves, we learn that Raheen’s father was once engaged to marry Karim’s mother, and that Raheen’s mother once pledged to marry Karim’s father. The story behind the exchange of fiancées, though revealed as an intimate personal story, has wider implications, since it is tied, obliquely, to the ethnic unrest of 1971, when civil war broke out between East and West Pakistan, and Bangladesh came into being.
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Focusing on the period between 1956 and 1958, Matthew Brzezinski recreates the Cold War atmosphere which began in the aftermath of World War II and culminated with the Russian launching of Sputnik in October, 1957. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, in their rush to occupy their post-war sectors of Germany, had wanted to acquire as much German technology as possible—rockets, missiles, and, of course, the German scientists who made it all possible. The US had all the advantages—finding a secret missile lab (hidden in a mountain with a concentration camp in front of it), removing dozens of advanced rockets and missiles to the US, and enticing key scientists to emigrate to the United States. Still, it was the Soviet Union, with far fewer spoils of war and much less developed missile programs, which succeeded in orbiting the first satellite. Brzezinski’s extensive research, detailed character analyses of the key players and their subordinates, and vivid recreations of the economic and political realities of both countries increase the tension in the lead-up to Sputnik.
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Against the backdrop of Palestinian history from 1923 – 1948, Lebanese author Selim Nassib creates the extraordinary love story of passionate, young Golda Meir and Albert Pharoan, a wealthy Arab banker. Pharaon has abandoned the high life of Beirut, along with his wife and children, to live in Haifa, where he is a first-hand observer of the growing Zionist movement, along with the conflicts Zionism creates among the Arab people. From 1929 to 1936, according to legend (corroborated by his family, though not hers), they see each other secretly, reveling in each other’s company even as they are poles apart in their visions for Palestine. Their affair takes place during major policy decisions by the high-powered leaders with whom Golda associates, well described here, but Nassib’s point of view is obviously different from that of most western “founding-of-Israel novels.”
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