Taylor Puckett Puckett থেকে Rodeio Bonito - RS, Brazil
This is the fourth time I have read this book and it was just as good. This is my kind of apocalyptic book. I love the characters and am invested in the story pretty much right away.
Pefect! Irving wackiness set in India!! Loved it!!
Pretty amazing! I enjoyed it a lot. Maybe this is just my problem but I was surprised at the lack of suspense/tension when I was past the 75% mark and the climax was beginning. But I'm pretty sure that's me because otherwise it was fantastic! Probably will re-read to fix my lack of tension issues and I'll find it great again.
It doesn't get much harder than writing about present-day politics, a difficulty that Tariq Ali doesn't fully overcome. This is the most in-depth book I have read about Islamic fundamentalism and its relation to terrorism and American imperialism. Ali puts Marxist theory to work in understanding the landscape of today's world politics. American, Western European, and Arab public would be well-served by understanding Ali's conception of American imperialism within the context of neo-colonialism growing out of the post-World War II and then post-Cold War power vacuum. ...Another way of saying that countries like Israel and the Arab nation would be acting to resolve their issues rather than jockeying for America's political backing. The problem I had with the book is that it could've been better. It could've been more focused rather than being a series of in-depth magazine articles. The chapters do not build upon one another and Ali does not develop a central argument, even though he hints an intriguing one. One of the questions Ali poses is, "Why hasn't Islam had a Reformation?" The importance of the Reformation, for Ali, is its role in permitting religious tolerance and other individual freedoms. Perhaps the most serious weakness of the book, as it itself suggests, is that it spends too much time trying to sketch a broad history of Islam that spans three continents and a dozen or so countries. The time would be better spent imagining the possbility of an Islamic Reformation and its potential to become a counter-imperialist movement, stressing both individual peoples and nations right to self-determination. For those of you still reading, class dismissed, or some other such nonsense. Thanks for reading.