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Six Books Of The Year For 2014

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  • Six Books Of The Year For 2014

    SIX BOOKS OF THE YEAR FOR 2014

    Huffington Post
    Dec 24 2014

    by Christopher Atamian, Writer, director, producer and translator

    2014, not a bad year for books, all told. Below you will find
    a completely arbitrary list of some of 2014's most Interesting,
    controversial books and a few that I simply found fascinating -- as
    well as a preview of two gifted new novelists. They make the perfect
    gift-at Christmas or any time of the year!

    Non-Fiction

    The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, by Matt
    Taibbi (Spiegel and Grau)

    A must-read, Taibbi's latest journalistic grenade throw is a perfect
    complement to Thomas Picketty's 2013 blockbuster Capital in the 21st
    Century. In this stirring, fast paced book, Taibbi describes black
    men incarcerated for "obstructing pedestrian traffic" in an age where
    crime in America has dropped while our prison population -- mostly made
    up of minority men and woman -- has doubled. Prosecutors who believe
    their clients are guilty before they even listen to what they have to
    say and the poor jailed for minor and sometimes imaginary offensives,
    while white collar criminals in our top financial institutions and
    corporations are routinely exonerated: the examples narrated here by
    Taibbi are so outrageous as to be barely believable.

    The wealth gap in America described by Picketty also has its twin
    in the justice gap so throroughly illustrated in this book. Taibbi
    belongs to the best investigative reporters in recent history --
    sadly what he uncovers here is a rather poor reflection on a society
    which has criminalized poverty and institutionalized racism.

    My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit
    (Random House)

    A fast-paced, wonderfully-written book about the founding of Israel
    up until contemporary days by one of that country's so-called New
    Historians. Shavit, whose British grandfather was one of the Jewish
    state's founding fathers, comes as close as anyone has of late to
    presenting 20th century Israeli history in an objective manner,
    one sensitive to both the parallel if often competing Jewish and
    Palestinian narratives. Through it all, he remains in awe in the
    achievements of this small country on the Mediterrannean, which
    represented a breathtaking rebirth for a people who took their fates
    into their own hands and built a modern, prosperous state.

    Fiction

    The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown)

    We waited something like a decade for the author of A Secret
    History and The Little Friend to dazzle us again and Francine Prose
    nonwithstanding, Tartt has delivered with her Pulitzer Prize-winning
    novel. She is now a more mature novelist who nevertheless retains
    her flair for the sometimes dark and hidden sides of her characters
    and society, a Southern Gothic brought to the Northern climes, if
    you will. This massive, sometimes rambling nearly 600-page novel
    could easily have been cut -- the entire middle section which takes
    palce in Las Vegas seems dubious to me -- but one remains interested
    in its main character's fate throughout -- a young latter-day Oliver
    Twist who loses his mother at the novel's onset in a terrible museum
    explosion. His relationship with a old furniture retorator who takes
    him in and his dealings with a dangerous international art mafia
    make this part Catcher in the Rye, part suspense thriller difficult
    to put down. Technically a 2013 novel, it is worth picking up again.

    The Last Illusion, by Porochista Khapour (Blomsbury)

    Khakpour's riveting second novel combines Iranian mythology with
    recent American history into an utterly original and enjoyable read.

    This 9-11 novel details the life of a latter-day birdman born in Iran
    and repatriated to the neurotic jungle-like streets of New York City.

    Khakpour based her novel on The Book of Zal from the Persian epic
    The Shahnahmeh. It's a fun novel as well, and one which should have
    garnered more attention. And as Khakpour points out in a recent
    interview, itmay also be one of the few novels in recent times -- or
    ever -- to recount detailed episodes of entomophagy (you look it up!)-

    Two Debuts Novels by Young Female Novelists

    Orhan's Inheritance, Algonquin Books by Aline Ohanesian

    Ohanesian's book is an enjoyable and slightly different take on the
    legacy of the Armenian Genocide. 2015 marks the 100th commemoration
    of this tragic event which claimed the lives of 3 million Christians
    living in the Ottoman Empire. As a plethora of documentaries, articles
    and other media begin to stream through on this topic, readers may
    want to pick up Ohanessian's tale of a young Istanbullu who returns
    to his native Anatolia to find out that the past is not quite what
    he thought it was -- and that even the house that he grew up in may
    in fact belong to former occupants of a different race and religion
    long gone. Orhan's Inheritance will be released to coincide with
    April 24th remembrances around the world -- the day when Armenian
    intellectuals and businessmen were rounded up in Istanbul and sent
    to concentration camps where they were summarily executed. (Advance
    copies are currently available for review.)

    This book should be combined with a re-reading of Franz Werfel's 1933
    classic The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which recounts the Masada-like
    defense by a group of Hatay province Armenian civilians who flee to a
    mountain and hold off the Turkish army for forty days and forty nights.

    Who is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko (New Vessel Press, translated
    from the German by Arabella Spencer)

    Ukrianian-born Gaponenko's ably translated tale of an aging
    ornithologist who returns to a Viennese hotel that he frequented as a
    child with his classical music-loving aunts is one of the strangest
    debuts that I have read in a long time, which is what makes it so
    interesting. It's a wondrous tale about the passing of generations and
    worlds; the taking stock of one's life, as well as a parable of sorts
    for a society set on its head last century, one where everything --
    birds, scientists and maybe the human race itself may be on a fast
    track to extinction. Gaponenko's prose is clever yet fluid and
    uncomplicated, laced with subtle and not-so-subtle irony and humor.

    Who is Martha, you ask? I won't reveal that here, but Gaponenko
    implies that she may well be each one of us.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-atamian/six-books-of-the-year-for_b_6368852.html

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