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    Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London
    Unavailable
    Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London
    Unavailable
    Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London
    Audiobook4 hours

    Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 24, 2015
    ISBN9780698189041
    Unavailable
    Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

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    Reviews for Discontent and its Civilizations

    3.5/5

    31 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A bit of a cook's tour motivating Hamid's novels, which I haven't read, but the deep dive into Pakistani geopolitics is illuminating.
    • 5/5
      Mohsin Hamid has a talent for taking a very complicated and messy situation and laying it out in a simple and logical manner. I felt like I had more hope for Pakistan after listening to this audio book.
    • 3/5
      I like Mohsin Hamid's fictional work. I like it a lot. Then, given my relationship with his native Pakistan, I was obviously interested in this collection of essays, of which I hadn't read any before.

      However, Discontent and Its Civilizations (a funny wordplay on one of Freud's later works) at first didn't live up to its expectations. Perhaps the expectations were too high since there are more quotes titled 'Praise' than actual essays in this book... In short, I wasn't so much enthralled by the first two sets, titled Life and Art.

      But then I came to the third part, titled Politics. Many of the essays there either blew me away or at least came across as very enlightening, endearing and skillfully analysed at the same time. I really enjoyed reading the second half of this book and will certainly mull over the insights it has given me for a long time.

      So, nowhere near the 'near-perfect essay collection' to me, as was promised, but a worthwhile read nevertheless.
    • 3/5
      I haven't read any of Hamid's fiction, although I plan to try "The Reluctant Fundamentalist", but the premise of this book interested me. In the end, though, I was disappointed. The section dealing with his life was mildly interesting, but superficial. He identifies with Pakistan as home, but is that mostly because his family lives there? I was hoping for more cross-cultural insights. What makes one country home, even if its language is not your first language? The section on art I found dull. Finally, the section on politics suffered from being (necessarily) out of date. Although he grouped the articles and thoughts in approximate chronological order, there was no overall coherent time line and no explicit commentary on whether things he had hoped for had indeed occurred. While I am sure no one would disagree that peace in Afghanistan and peace with India are important goals, I was hampered by a lack of in depth knowledge to evaluate his views. He writes as an author living in Pakistan who has lived in the US and UK, which gives him a unique perspective, but I wonder what other "experts" would say on the topics he discusses. The political points he made were all "big picture" points and I found his repeated hopes for Pakistan made me want to tell him to stop writing and go and do something about it.