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Title details for Discontent and its Civilizations by Mohsin Hamid - Available

Discontent and its Civilizations

Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

by Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid
Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
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1 of 2 copies available
From “one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers” (The New York Times), intimate and sharply observed commentary on life, art, politics, and “the war on terror.”
 
Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international bestseller, they have earned him a reputation as a “master critic of the modern global condition” (Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family, identity. Here he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political, and are shot through with the same passion, imagination, and breathtaking shifts of perspective that gives his fiction its unmistakable electric charge.
 
A “water lily” who has called three countries on three continents his home—Pakistan, the birthplace to which he returned as a young father; the United States, where he spent his childhood and young adulthood; and Britain, where he married and became a citizen—Hamid writes about overlapping worlds with fluidity and penetrating insight. Whether he is discussing courtship rituals or pop culture, drones or the rhythms of daily life in an extended family compound, he transports us beyond the scarifying headlines of an anxious West and a volatile East, beyond stereotype and assumption, and helps to bring a dazzling diverse global culture within emotional and intellectual reach.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 24, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781101887868
      • File size: 127600 KB
      • Duration: 04:25:49

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Author-narrator Hamid competently delivers his recent work, a compilation of essays touching on globalization, multicultural issues, and his life moving between Lahore, Pakistan, New York, and London. Playing off the title of a Freud work on the tensions surrounding modern society, Hamid speaks at an easy pace with clear diction and a light accent as he conveys his messages of humanity's universal themes, diversity, modernity, and the war on terrorism. While his insights may be intriguing and even provocative, listening can occasionally be tiring as he often speaks in a monotone that flattens the emotional impact of his words. Nonetheless, his sense of timing and use of emphasis, however sporadic, connect well with his topics. M.L.R. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 24, 2014
      This collection of 36 essays will be of most interest to dedicated fans of Pakistani novelist Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia). Others, however, may be disappointed to find that the pieces, most of which were previously published, tend to be topical and of limited scope. Hamid, who has also lived in New York City and London, provides a voice of reasoned tolerance on the issues dividing the Middle East and the West,, but he might have been better served by writing a memoir. Instead, he offers thoughts on a wide variety of topics, some more rewarding than others: e-books, whether TV dramas are the new good novels, the home-cooked dinner he almost made for Toni Morrison, etc. An essay on President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo seems out of date; the piece would have benefited from an afterword giving Hamid’s view of the speech’s lasting significance. The lighthearted essays dilute the impact of the more substantive sections—especially those delving into the so-called clash of civilizations, such as the title essay, in which he writes: “The idea that we fall into civilizations, plural, is merely a politically convenient myth.”

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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