HCT Featured Book of the Month

Book of the month for April

2010-04-06T10:19:00.003+04:00

Mithen (The Prehistory of Mind; After the Ice) draws on archaeological record and current research on neurology and genetics to explain how and why humans think, talk and make music the way they do. If it sounds impenetrably academic, it isn't: Mithen acts as a friendly guide to the troves of data on the evolution of man (and myriad sub-mysteries of the mind, music, speech and cognition), translating specialist material into an engrossing narrative casual readers will appreciate. Beginning with a survey of modern theories of the evolution of language, music and thought, Mithen cherry picks ones that lay the groundwork for the book's second (and most substantial) part, which applies those ideas to 4.5 million years of evolutionary history, beginning with the earliest known hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, and ending with Homo sapiens. Mithen's work here is equally remarkable, but perhaps because this is his area of specialty, the findings are less accessible to the average reader: they hinge largely on subtle differences in the interpretation of archaeological sites and the dating of artifacts. However, Mithen's expertise in the science and history of his subject is combined with a passion for music that makes this book enjoyable and fascinating. Readers from most academic disciplines will find the work of interest, as will general readers comfortable with research-based argument and analysis.

~Publishers Weekly

GET IT FROM THE HCT LIBRARY CATALOGUE

Book of the month for February

2010-02-01T10:31:00.003+04:00

Last year's The Savage Detectives by the late Chilean-Mexican novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) garnered extraordinary sales and critical plaudits for a complex novel in translation, and quickly became the object of a literary cult. This brilliant behemoth is grander in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job. The novel is divided into five parts (Bolaño originally imagined it being published as five books) and begins with the adventures and love affairs of a small group of scholars dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German novelist. They trace the writer to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (read: Juarez), but there the trail runs dry, and it isn't until the final section that readers learn about Benno and why he went to Santa Teresa. The heart of the novel comes in the three middle parts: in The Part About Amalfitano, a professor from Spain moves to Santa Teresa with his beautiful daughter, Rosa, and begins to hear voices. The Part About Fate, the novel's weakest section, concerns Quincy Fate Williams, a black American reporter who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and ends up rescuing Rosa from her gun-toting ex-boyfriend. The Part About the Crimes, the longest and most haunting section, operates on a number of levels: it is a tormented catalogue of women murdered and raped in Santa Teresa; a panorama of the power system that is either covering up for the real criminals with its implausible story that the crimes were all connected to a German national, or too incompetent to find them (or maybe both); and it is a collection of the stories of journalists, cops, murderers, vengeful husbands, prisoners and tourists, among others, presided over by an old woman seer. It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.

~Publishers Weekly Review

~Recommended by Pamella Asquith

Get it from the HCT Library Catalogue

Book of the month for December

2009-12-08T15:31:00.003+04:00

Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man's wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are "good guys," but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out.

~Publishers Weekly

GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOGUE

Book of the month for June

2009-06-03T13:51:00.005+04:00

Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts.

~Publishers Weekly

GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOGUE

Book of the month for May

2009-05-03T10:47:00.002+04:00

Adult/High School-A novel about assimilation and generational differences. Gogol is so named because his father believes that sitting up in a sleeping car reading Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" saved him when the train he was on derailed and most passengers perished. After his arranged marriage, the man and his wife leave India for America, where he eventually becomes a professor. They adopt American ways, yet all of their friends are Bengalis. But for young Gogol and his sister, Boston is home, and trips to Calcutta to visit relatives are voyages to a foreign land. He finds his strange name a constant irritant, and eventually he changes it to Nikhil. When he is a senior at Yale, his father finally tells him the story of his name. Moving to New York to work as an architect, he meets Maxine, his first real love, but they separate after his father dies. Later, his mother reintroduces him to a Bengali woman, and they fall in love and marry, but their union does not last. The tale comes full circle when the protagonist, home for a Bengali Christmas, rediscovers his father's gift of Gogol's short stories. This novel will attract not just teens of other cultures, but also readers struggling with the challenges of growing up and tugging at family ties.

~School Library Journal

GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOG

Book of the month for April

2009-04-01T08:15:00.002+04:00

The daughter of a wealthy government official, Najwa grows up pampered and carefree in western Sudan during the 1980s. With her 19th birthday, though, comes the overthrow of the president and arrest of her father by the new government. Najwa; her twin brother, Omar; and their mother flee to London. Within a few years, she is completely alone: her father has been executed, her mother succumbs to a fatal illness, and Omar is in prison for an assault conviction stemming from his drug abuse. Once a fashionable university student in Khartoum, the young woman makes ends meet as a nanny to a wealthy Arab family. Clothed in traditional Muslim hijab, she has suddenly become invisible within the city, much as the Ethiopian servants used to blend into the background in her parents household. Yet even as she comes to terms with this anonymity, a spark develops between her and the younger brother of her employer, and she is forced to confront the chasm between servant and master. Aboulela offers a captivating glimpse into one womans journey through the various strata of society. The protagonists experiences give her a deeper reliance on her faith and help her to recognize the shallowness of the life she left behind. This is the authors first work to be published in the U.S. Students will appreciate the story not only for its insights into Muslim faith and traditions, but also for the ways her compellingly real characters relate to one another.

~ School Library Journal

I like her adventure in this story and the way she feels about her faith and wearing hijab and reading Quran. - Khawla Al Shehhi Ras Al Khaimah Women's College

Get this book from the HCT Catalog

Book of the month for March

2009-03-01T09:35:00.002+04:00

British novelist Gaiman (American Gods; Stardust) and his long-time accomplice McKean (collaborators on a number of Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels as well as The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish) spin an electrifyingly creepy tale likely to haunt young readers for many moons. After Coraline and her parents move into an old house, Coraline asks her mother about a mysterious locked door. Her mother unlocks it to reveal that it leads nowhere: "When they turned the house into flats, they simply bricked it up," her mother explains. But something about the door attracts the girl, and when she later unlocks it herself, the bricks have disappeared. Through the door, she travels a dark corridor (which smells "like something very old and very slow") into a world that eerily mimics her own, but with sinister differences. "I'm your other mother," announces a woman who looks like Coraline's mother, except "her eyes were big black buttons." Coraline eventually makes it back to her real home only to find that her parents are missing--they're trapped in the shadowy other world, of course, and it's up to their scrappy daughter to save them. Gaiman twines his taut tale with a menacing tone and crisp prose fraught with memorable imagery ("Her other mother's hand scuttled off Coraline's shoulder like a frightened spider"), yet keeps the narrative just this side of terrifying. The imagery adds layers of psychological complexity (the button eyes of the characters in the other world vs. the heroine's increasing ability to distinguish between what is real and what is not; elements of Coraline's dreams that inform her waking decisions). McKean's scratchy, angular drawings, reminiscent of Victorian etchings, add an ominous edge that helps ensure this book will be a real bedtime-buster.

~Review by Publishers Weekly

GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOGUE

Book of the month for February

2009-02-04T11:08:00.003+04:00

Again, as in The Haunting (1982), New Zealand writer Mahy proves that all-out supernatural stories can still be written with intelligence, humor, and a fearful intensity that never descends into pretentious murk or lurid sensationalism. Laura, 14, living with divorced Mum (a bookstore manager) and little brother Jacko in a small New Zealand town, is a "sensitive." She gets "warnings" when big disturbances - like her parents' divorce - are imminent. She has the ability to take one look at older schoolmate Sorensen Carlisle and know that he's a witch. And when an old junk-store owner named Carmody Braque playfully stamps Jacko's hand with a smiling replica of Braque's own face, it's Laura who soon realizes that something ghastly has happened: "the stamp was part of him now, more than a tattoo - a sort of parasite picture tunneling its way deeper and deeper, feeding itself as it went." Jacko falls ill, then becomes seriously, mysteriously sick, wasting away, comatose, in a hospital bed. Laura's distraught mother, now growing closer to a librariansuitor, can't even listen to her daughter's ideas about the supernatural causes of Jacko's decline. So Laura desperately turns for help to "Sorry" Carlisle, who lives in a forbidding ancestral manse with his mother and grandmother - good witches who tried (in vain) to give Sorry a normal life away from magic. At first the Carlisles are cautious, distant, slow to admit their witchly powers; Sorry, deeply ambivalent about witch-hood, is sarcastic, sexually teasing. But eventually they agree to guide Laura in her battle for Jacko's life against Carmody Braque, a demon who must feed on human souls and bodies. The first step? Laura must make the "changeover" into witch-hood - something her psychic sensibility makes possible. (The visionary ritual involved is a perfect mix of the chilling and the comic, with Laura taking pot-shots at the poor literary quality of Sorry's chants.) Then, with moral support from Sorry, Laura must have a one-on-one confrontation with demon Braque, hiding her new witch-hood behind dark glasses and stamping his hand with a sign of her power. And finally, after Braque's Oz-style annihilation ("he continued to change back through the centuries of stolen life until his clothes collapsed around what at first appeared to be a rotting, heaving mass"), Laura can celebrate Jacko's recovery - and her own recovery from "a secret illness no one had ever completely recognized or been able to cure": the post-divorce hatred of her father, the jealousy of her mother's new boyfriend. Mahy thus invests the occult evils here with a metaphorical, psychological undertow; at the same time, however, while filling out all the characters (including the witches) with textured charm, she never stints on thoroughgoing creeps and scares. In sum: the best supernatural YA fiction around, with Stephen King power and Mahy's own class and polish.

~Review by Kirkus Reviews

GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOGUE

Book of the month for January

2009-01-04T08:39:00.003+04:00

PITY the contemporary travel writer: routinely viewed as a kind of overstuffed guidebook author, struggling to explain exactly what he or she does. Specialists pounce on the tiniest "mistakes," and ideologues condemn the whole enterprise as colonialism with a thesaurus. Meanwhile, there's no single go-to word for what this most curious and searching of writers seeks to produce. Travel narrative? Peripatetic memoir? Adventure yarn? Not that this even matters, since — or so the prevailing wisdom goes — the best journeys have already been made. All that's left is a specious sort of experiential plagiarism.

Not quite. Rory Stewart's first book, "The Places in Between," recounts his journey across Afghanistan in January 2002. Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening. But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban — and entirely on foot. There are some Medusa-slayingly gutsy travel writers out there — Redmond O'Hanlon, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert Young Pelton — but Stewart makes them look like Hilton sisters.

Paul Theroux once described a certain kind of travel book as having mainly "human sacrifice" allure, and how close Stewart comes to being killed on his journey won't be disclosed here. He is, however, sternly warned before he begins his walk. "You are the first tourist in Afghanistan," observes an Afghan from the country's recently resurrected Security Service. "It is mid-winter," he adds. "There are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee." For perhaps the first time in the history of travel writing, a secret-police goon emerges as the voice of sobriety and reason.

Recalling an American journalist who wondered if Stewart thought what he was doing was dangerous, he writes, "I had never found a way to answer that question without sounding awkward, insincere or ridiculous." He's then asked if he has read "Into the Wild," Jon Krakauer's account of a well-meaning young man's doomed trek into the Alaskan wilderness. It is, Stewart is told, more than a little pointedly, "a great piece of journalism."

So is "The Places in Between" — a pipsqueak title for what is otherwise a striding, glorious book. But it's more than great journalism. It's a great travel narrative. Learned but gentle, tough but humane, Stewart — a Scottish journalist who has served in both the British Army and the Foreign Office — seems hewn from 19th-century DNA, yet he's also blessed with a 21st-century motherboard. He writes with a mystic's appreciation of the natural world, a novelist's sense of character and a comedian's sense of timing.

Review by the New York Times read the full review here

GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOGUE

Book of the month for December

2008-12-01T11:54:00.004+04:00

You have heard about Superman, Spiderman and other superheroes, but do you know who Ajaaj is?!! Ajaaj is UAE superhero, a mysterious sandstorm that can morph into a young Emirati man with superpowers to build a wall or even a bridge. He is a legend from the past that protects the future. The year is 2020, and Dubai is a powerful economic city. An evil man is trying to take down and destroy Dubai, but Ajaaj keeps on stopping his plans. Then he starts manipulating media, through his news channel, by showing UAE people that, Ajaaj the sandstorm is creating all of these disasters. Everyone is affected by the media, everyone except Shamma and Humaid, who have seen Ajaaj in action and know that he was defending and not destroying. The conflict between Ajaaj and the evil man comes to culmination in volume 6, when Ajaaj sacrifices himself for the Emirati people, by using his strength to fight an ocean storm. Will he lose his powers?!! Will he die?!! Don’t forget that legends don’t die. The late Shaikh Zayed once said: “Who doesn’t have a past won’t have a future”. Ajaaj is a comic book that joins the past, the present, and the future. It also shows how easily people are affected by the news and the media around them. Published by Watani in 7 volumes and available in both Arabic and English

Review by Amal Al Sharqi, recommended by Sharjah Colleges
GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOGUE

Book of the month for November

2008-11-02T08:23:00.002+04:00

Linda Davies is a prolific writer of thrillers, tales of espionage and stories revolving around the world of financial intrigue, but recently she has dabbled in the world of children’s fiction. “Sea Djinn” is her latest offering, and in Harry Potteresque style, Davies weaves an adventurous tale involving mythical sea lords and modern day Dubai.
The story involves three teenage heroes. Finn Kennedy comes to live with his cousin Georgie in Dubai after his parents disappear at sea. One night while star gazing on a Dubai beach, he meets Triton the sea djinn, a supernatural being with spectacular powers. Triton reveals he knows the true whereabouts of Finn’s parents. They have been held captive in the fantastical underwater world of the evil Hydrus, also a sea djinn. Triton enlists Finn’s help to wage war against the evil sea djinn and his dark kingdom.
Finn and Georgie, along with their new found friend Fred, are trained by Mr Violet, a Light Fighter. He is a teacher at Finn’s school who has been strategically placed there along with a few others by Triton. Together they train their magical powers to fight the fight of their lives.
This is a brilliant and original tale of good versus evil with many surprises along the way. It is set in the all too familiar back drop of Jumeirah Beach which makes it a special read for long time and the not so long time residents of the UAE.
Of real note is the fact that Linda Davies herself has survived a kidnapping at sea by the Iranian army. She drew heavily from this experience to encapsulate the terror experienced by Finn’s parents in the novel.

~Review by Helen Weston recommended by Abu Dhabi Men's College
GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOG

Book of the month for October

2008-10-05T09:12:00.006+04:00

There has been a lot of debate lately about the legitimacy of fiction depicting history Half of a Yellow Sun, is one such story which compels readers to ‘feel’ the facts of the Nigeria–Biafra war from 1967-70. This intimate and powerful, yet delicate novel focuses on the individual’s thoughts and emotions, the subtleties of human relationships and the psychological legacies of colonialism.
The characters who deliver the story are: a young privileged middle-class Igbo woman, Olanna, a young servant village boy, Ugwu, and Richard, an English university lecturer. All are caught up in the unfolding political events of this time. The three main characters lives all intersect where they have to question their own responses to the vicious civil war that claimed more than two million lives (including the grandfathers of the writer among the many thousands of civilians dead).
Adichie’s father was Nigeria’s first university professor of statistics and the book's character of Richard is based on him.& The book opens with the young servant who longs to please the university lecturer to the point of ironing his socks - a domestic chore which goes horribly wrong resulting in the burning of the items. The lecturer recognizes that Ugwu is clever and deserves an education for which he is prepared to pay. A charming, lasting relationship is about to begin.
The backdrop of war does not overshadow the development of her characters with a detailed sketch of Nigeria as place: cashew trees, mangoes, mud walls, nouveau riche ostentation.
Adichie’s characters are disadvantaged by being themselves. She ingeniously uses their failings as a way of establishing a narrative tension and of creating comedy. Ugwu does not know enough; Olanna, beautiful and educated knows too much. These very different viewpoints puts the reader in the unique position of being able to see the effects of war on various levels of society. It is through this fictional account of such a war the reader can investigate the moral responsibility about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these matters.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 29, won the 2007 Orange prize for fiction with this book. Adichie is a graduate of the African Studies program at Yale University. She does believe there is a long way to go before the new Nigerian novel can change the literary landscape of an impoverished country where bookshops are relatively few. Her novel has been the talk of middle-aged Nigerians and one such man described how the book had moved his wife to talk to him about her traumatic experiences four decades ago.
~Review by Melanie Pearson recommended by Dubai Women's College
GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOG

Book of the month for September

2008-08-31T12:02:00.005+04:00

Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched. Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to him, for he lacks the intuitive "theory of mind" by which most of us sense what's going on in other people's heads. When his neighbor's poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes (one of his favorite characters) and track down the killer. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him. In the hands of first-time novelist Haddon, Christopher is a fascinating case study and, above all, a sympathetic boy: not closed off, as the stereotype would have it, but too open-overwhelmed by sensations, bereft of the filters through which normal people screen their surroundings. Christopher can only make sense of the chaos of stimuli by imposing arbitrary patterns ("4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks"). His literal-minded observations make for a kind of poetic sensibility and a poignant evocation of character. Though Christopher insists, "This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them," the novel brims with touching, ironic humor. The result is an eye-opening work in a unique and compelling literary voice.
~ Publishers Weekly
GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOG

Book of the month for May

2008-05-15T12:08:00.002+04:00

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today.

Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them — in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul — they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

GET THIS BOOK FROM THE HCT CATALOG