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mwplante's review against another edition
4.0
An excellent faux/demi-memoir. Will definitely be looking for more from Ghosh in the future.
thehistorianslibrary's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
slow-paced
kingoftheworms's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
I adore this book! Read it for a college course on the Indian Ocean, which gave me a hefty opportunity to unpack its themes. It is history and ethnography woven together, and we all agreed that ethnography is Ghosh's strong suit. Uncovering the history of a 12th century slave with him is cool, but it's his accounts of the people around him and the relationships he forms that make it come alive. This book is decolonization in action: We live in a world where Western values of power, violence, and technology dominate, but it is our curiosities and connections that keep humanity alive.
sharanyasarathy's review against another edition
5.0
The comments made me apprehensive but I loved this book. The interspersed history and the vivid anecdotes of travel by Ghosh kept the book compelling, and I was always excited to pick it back up. This book seems especially important now, at a time when religious and cultural differences are pointed to as reasons for discord. It is reassuring to remember that people were able to achieve somewhat harmonious integration and cultural fluidity in the 12th century!
gabiloue's review against another edition
4.0
This book was fascinating in scope and exquisite in the details, offering a really interesting reading experience for those (like me) interested in Middle Eastern life and/or history.
Ghosh retells his experiences living in Egypt along with his research as a historian on an Indian slave, and through that the reader is able to connect with not only the villagers he meets but also the people he researches (but the villagers definitely come most alive on the page and are the book's main attractions, in my opinion). The discussion involving the historical research done to develop this story also helps the reader truly appreciate the work that goes into such a job, and offers intriguing information. And for such an informational book, the ending was actually rather emotional for me.
My only critiques here would be that those looking for an easier reading experience may want to look elsewhere, as some sections of the novel (especially those involving the historical and research accounts) began to read more like a textbook and less like a story, and I began to find myself at the end of a page having retained none of the words I had read. I also felt that the connection of the slave's story with the more modern story the author was telling were only weakly connected, even at the end, so I didn't see much point in the historical narrative other than it just interesting information.
All in all though, this book was a really good and interesting read and I'm definitely glad to have picked it up.
Ghosh retells his experiences living in Egypt along with his research as a historian on an Indian slave, and through that the reader is able to connect with not only the villagers he meets but also the people he researches (but the villagers definitely come most alive on the page and are the book's main attractions, in my opinion). The discussion involving the historical research done to develop this story also helps the reader truly appreciate the work that goes into such a job, and offers intriguing information. And for such an informational book, the ending was actually rather emotional for me.
My only critiques here would be that those looking for an easier reading experience may want to look elsewhere, as some sections of the novel (especially those involving the historical and research accounts) began to read more like a textbook and less like a story, and I began to find myself at the end of a page having retained none of the words I had read. I also felt that the connection of the slave's story with the more modern story the author was telling were only weakly connected, even at the end, so I didn't see much point in the historical narrative other than it just interesting information.
All in all though, this book was a really good and interesting read and I'm definitely glad to have picked it up.
pattydsf's review against another edition
3.0
Part of my present work for my local library is weeding the collection. I am well prepared for this work – I helped weed my junior high library in the late 1960’s. Very few library staff members like weeding because there is always a favorite item that no one loves but us. My prime example is Hitty, her first hundred years by Rachel Field. I loved that book and when I saw it on the sale shelf many years ago, I was very sad. However, that book is 88 years old, there isn’t much to recommend it to girls who have iPods and the internet.
So, when I was making up lists of items that needed to be weeded, I often looked at the audiobooks. I will listen to lots of different books and I am always curious what is out there. This book by Ghosh caught my eye.
Ghosh is an author that I knew but had never read. I am not sure why I thought this book was a good place to start, let’s just say that I let serendipity take over.
I am not sorry that I listened to this tale. To be more accurate, I am not sorry that I experienced these two tales. It is just that, in my opinion, this is a very odd book. Ghosh has taken two stories, one his own visits to Egypt and the other the story of a merchant that lived in both Egypt and India in the 1100’s. I still don’t understand why he put these stories in one book. Maybe if I had read this, I would have a better understanding.
Both tales were very interesting. Every time I considered giving up, Ghosh would bring up some new information or insights that would make me stay for another chapter. I believe reading should bring us to worlds we can’t experience for ourselves and should teach us something. This book did that for me on every disc.
This history also introduced me to Ghosh, who is a good writer. I would like to try one of his novels.
So, when I was making up lists of items that needed to be weeded, I often looked at the audiobooks. I will listen to lots of different books and I am always curious what is out there. This book by Ghosh caught my eye.
Ghosh is an author that I knew but had never read. I am not sure why I thought this book was a good place to start, let’s just say that I let serendipity take over.
I am not sorry that I listened to this tale. To be more accurate, I am not sorry that I experienced these two tales. It is just that, in my opinion, this is a very odd book. Ghosh has taken two stories, one his own visits to Egypt and the other the story of a merchant that lived in both Egypt and India in the 1100’s. I still don’t understand why he put these stories in one book. Maybe if I had read this, I would have a better understanding.
Both tales were very interesting. Every time I considered giving up, Ghosh would bring up some new information or insights that would make me stay for another chapter. I believe reading should bring us to worlds we can’t experience for ourselves and should teach us something. This book did that for me on every disc.
This history also introduced me to Ghosh, who is a good writer. I would like to try one of his novels.
nattygsmith's review against another edition
4.0
This was a wonderful exploration of the relationships between time and place in both the historical and present Middle Eastern region. The author's biographical story of his experience in Egypt was insightful and beautiful, and the investigation into the lives of a 12th century Egyptian businessman and his slave/business agent was an adventure of historical research and hypotheses. Ultimately, the melding of these two narratives made this a wonderful testament to the very human experience of any person, anywhere in the world.
22_'s review against another edition
5.0
Amitav Ghosh is essayist and blogger as well as novelist, and it was the sheer pleasure from some of his essays and blog posts that induced me to take on one of his novels.
Of his work this book appealed to me most, due to half-remembered reviews describing it as a melange of genres, of nationalities, of languages, cultures, professions, and eras. And because Ghosh in "Confessions of a Xenophile" says his time in Egypt was "my equivalent of writing school. While living in [the governorate of] Beheira I maintained a detailed journal, in which I made extensive notes about my conversations with people, and the things I saw around me. Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing; it also taught me how to translate raw experience on to the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have and it has stood me in good stead over the years."
After reading it, a phrase from Ghosh's lecture Bonds of Captivity: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-`Ain, 1916-18 (video, blogged as Shared Sorrows) can, I think, best summarizes this novel story: "reality often exceeds fiction in its improbability" (at 2:45 in the video). A number of times while reading this book I had to remind myself that the story told therein was non-fiction.
To me this book spoke volumes, as someone with Indian, Arab, and Muslim roots (long since relegated to memory) and with historic, economic, linguistic, and religious interests (still going strong). The two parts of the story told are Ghosh's long stay and subsequent visits to rural Egypt and the historic relationship that so captivated the then-young anthropologist-in-training's interest in the Middle East: the correspondence between Jewish merchants in Aden, in Yemen, and a North African Jewish merchant who lived in the Malabar, in western India, for twenty years who married a Nair woman and who sent a slave from Mangalore on his behalf to the Middle East. This correspondence, from the 1100s, survived because of a habit of these Jews to store all their written correspondences when not needed, and the discovery of such a cache in Fustat, once a Jewish center in Cairo.
This skeletal summary of me and of this book is really all I can give when I try to summarize its thesis. Or rather, there are just so many theses present---and they are all coherent and graspable despite their number because this book is a piece of rock carved from the mountain of Reality, perhaps sculpted and polished, but evoking the whole within the part, like a fractal or a hologram.
But perhaps one of the things that most surprised Ghosh is, in today's world of oil and post-colonialism and derivatives trading and Israel, how unlikely and foreign such a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual story from a millenium ago sounds. This set of relationships, spanning continents, spanning language families, crossing religious boundaries, that to him is so real because of his study of thousand year old letters and ledgers, is incomprehensibly unlikely to most people today, who unthinkingly think globalization presupposes an electronic civilization.
I have learned so much from this book and from this writer that I hope you will forgive me for not trying to enumerate them more than I have so far.
Of his work this book appealed to me most, due to half-remembered reviews describing it as a melange of genres, of nationalities, of languages, cultures, professions, and eras. And because Ghosh in "Confessions of a Xenophile" says his time in Egypt was "my equivalent of writing school. While living in [the governorate of] Beheira I maintained a detailed journal, in which I made extensive notes about my conversations with people, and the things I saw around me. Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing; it also taught me how to translate raw experience on to the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have and it has stood me in good stead over the years."
After reading it, a phrase from Ghosh's lecture Bonds of Captivity: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-`Ain, 1916-18 (video, blogged as Shared Sorrows) can, I think, best summarizes this novel story: "reality often exceeds fiction in its improbability" (at 2:45 in the video). A number of times while reading this book I had to remind myself that the story told therein was non-fiction.
To me this book spoke volumes, as someone with Indian, Arab, and Muslim roots (long since relegated to memory) and with historic, economic, linguistic, and religious interests (still going strong). The two parts of the story told are Ghosh's long stay and subsequent visits to rural Egypt and the historic relationship that so captivated the then-young anthropologist-in-training's interest in the Middle East: the correspondence between Jewish merchants in Aden, in Yemen, and a North African Jewish merchant who lived in the Malabar, in western India, for twenty years who married a Nair woman and who sent a slave from Mangalore on his behalf to the Middle East. This correspondence, from the 1100s, survived because of a habit of these Jews to store all their written correspondences when not needed, and the discovery of such a cache in Fustat, once a Jewish center in Cairo.
This skeletal summary of me and of this book is really all I can give when I try to summarize its thesis. Or rather, there are just so many theses present---and they are all coherent and graspable despite their number because this book is a piece of rock carved from the mountain of Reality, perhaps sculpted and polished, but evoking the whole within the part, like a fractal or a hologram.
But perhaps one of the things that most surprised Ghosh is, in today's world of oil and post-colonialism and derivatives trading and Israel, how unlikely and foreign such a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual story from a millenium ago sounds. This set of relationships, spanning continents, spanning language families, crossing religious boundaries, that to him is so real because of his study of thousand year old letters and ledgers, is incomprehensibly unlikely to most people today, who unthinkingly think globalization presupposes an electronic civilization.
I have learned so much from this book and from this writer that I hope you will forgive me for not trying to enumerate them more than I have so far.