5 BOOK REVIEWS (PART II) -

Here you can find a couple of my recommendations:

Marina Nemat

Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman’s Story
of Survival Inside an Iranian Prison

What would you give up to protect your loved ones? Your life?

This book is as a result of her heartbreaking, triumphant, and elegantly written memoir, Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat tells the heart-pounding story. Life as a young girl in Iran during the early days of Ayatollah Khomeini’s brutal Islamic Revolution.

Above all, in January 1982, Marina Nemat, then just sixteen years old, was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death for political crimes. Certainly, until then, her life in Tehran had centred around school, summer parties at the lake, and her crush on Andre, the young man she had met at church. But when math and history were subordinated to the study of the Koran and political propaganda, Marina protested. Further, her teacher replied, “If you don’t like it, leave.” She did, and, to her surprise, other students followed, for instance.

Also, she was arrested with hundreds of other youths who had dared to speak out. They were taken to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Two guards interrogated her. One beat her into unconsciousness; the other, Ali, fell in love with her.

Sentenced to death for refusing to give up the names of her friends. She was minutes from being executed when Ali, using his family connections to Ayatollah Khomeini, plucked her from the firing squad and had her sentence reduced to life in prison. But he exacted a shocking price for saving her life – with a dizzying combination of terror and tenderness. He asked her to marry him and abandon her Christian faith for Islam. If she didn’t, he would see to it that her family was harmed. She spent the next two years as a prisoner of the state, because of the man who held her life, and her family’s lives, in his hands.

Lyrical, passionate, and suffused throughout with grace and sensitivity, Marina Nemat’s memoir is like no other. Her search for emotional redemption envelops her jailers, her husband and his family, and the country of her birth – each of whom she grants the greatest gift of all: forgiveness.

A delightful book… At one point I wondered if it is really memoire or a story with a happy ending by the Brothers Grimm! I read it one evening just like the other memoirs of women in the Arab world. It hasn’t happened to me for a long time that I can’t leave the book from my hand. A very good book. I truly recommend it!

Simon Adams and Plantagenet Somerset Fry

History of the World

What caused Hurricane Katrina? What’s inside an Egyptian Pyramid? How did the Vikings wage war? This book provides answers to these questions and more. It also covers events including the Asian Tsunami and Human Genome Project.

Taking a global view of history, a carefully arranged, heavily illustrated chronology opens each chapter with a world map. As well as time chart that give readers a sense of what happened were at any given time.

Evan Thomas

A Long Time Coming

Newsweek has been renowned for its vivid, in-depth special election coverage of the ordeal of running for the presidency. But a year before the election, Newsweek assigns reporters to get inside the campaigns of the Republican and Democratic candidates. On the other hand, Newsweek promises not to publish any information until after the votes are cast. In exchange, the reporters receive remarkable access. They travel with the candidates, are there at crucial turning points and confidential meetings, and uncover stories not covered in day-to-day reporting. For example, in this book, a compelling narrative by Evan Thomas, Newsweek shares the inside stories from one of the most exciting elections in recent history. Illuminating the personalities and events that influenced the outcome, and taking stock of the key players and key issues for the new administration. To clarify, this will be an absorbing read for anyone interested in American politics.

George Samuel Clason

The Richest Man in Babylon

The Richest Man in Babylon is a 1926 book by George S. Clason that dispenses financial advice through a collection of parables set 4,000 years ago in ancient Babylon. The book remains in print almost a century after the parables were originally published. It is regarded as a classic of personal financial advice.

The parables are told by a fictional Babylonian character called Arkad, a poor scribe who became the “richest man in Babylon”. Included in Arkad’s advice are the “Seven Cures” (or how to generate money and wealth), and the “Five Laws of Gold” (or how to protect and invest wealth). That is to say, a core part of Arkad’s advice is around “paying yourself first”, “living within your means”, “investing in what you know”. In other words – the importance of “long-term saving”, and “homeownership”.

In this paragraph, gonna tell you about the content. Firstly, It is from a series of pamphlets distributed by U.S. banks and insurance companies in 1920–24. Secondly, the pamphlets were bound together and published as a book in 1926. Thirdly, the book is often referred to as a classic of personal financial advice. So appears in modern recommended reading lists on personal financial advice and wealth management. Consequently, has kept the book in print almost 90 years after its first edition with over 2 million copies sold.

Clason himself published an illustrated hardback edition in 1930 titled The Richest Man in Babylon and Other Stories which now sells for USD 1,250.

Therefore, the unusual structure of the book has inspired many modern derivative works providing further discussion and insights on the parables.

Very interesting book, I read it and I think everyone should do it. The book guides to explain how to manage your finances in a very simple way. It is impossible not to be left with a few things after you have finished reading it.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The Cubs and Other Stories

The Cubs and Other Stories is Mario Vargas Llosa’s only volume of short fiction available in English. Moreover, Vargas Llosa’s domain is the Peru of male youth and machismo. Where life’s dramas play themselves out on the soccer field, the dance floor, and on street corners.

The title story, “The Cubs,” tells the legend of the carefree boyhood of P.P. Cuellar and his friends. And of P.P.’s bizarre accident and tragic coming of age. Innovative in style and technique, however it is a work of both physical and psychic loss.

In an impartial and perceptive forward to this collection of early writing, most importantly, Vargas Llosa provides background to the volume and a unique glimpse into the mind of the Nobel Prize-winning artist.

Mario Vargas Llosa gathers moralizing stories, sad and out from reality. His characters generally fall prey to anger, vice, rage, pleasure, and eventually death. And bear unhealed wounds on their faces that make them capable of irrational or abusive behavior… Reading the book takes you to alert in a world dominated by envy and fear. a world of eternal domination and desire for power. Where the fist makes the law or where friendship can not be a substitute for the courage to accept a drama for which not the sufferer he is guilty.