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Review Summary: Now, what do we want to DO about it? |
Date: 2008-08-03 |
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Details: Compelling, and powerfully written. The author equates big dams and nuclear bombs, showing both to be agents of mass destruction by the Indian government - and, by implication, other governments. It is a book written with a passion to educate people about the costs - human, environmental, social, and fiscal - of dams and bombs. Very accessible, and the author is careful to use facts and figures to make, and not overstate, her case. It is a timely manifesto that demands more of a response than a nod and a sigh before moving on to the next book or TV show. |
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Review Summary: roy strikes again |
Date: 2007-07-11 |
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Details: Arundhati Roy is more or less guaranteed to hit below the belt. For an American reader, she is also guaranteed to teach you something you probably knew little about. She invariably does so in a marvelous fashion; her prose is unmatched. If you enjoyed her work of fiction, The God of Small Things, I encourage you to try her non-fiction works.
This book focuses on the dams on India; it's a passionate argument against damming and in favor of considering people, all the poor people of India.
Roy also discusses India's testing of the atomic bomb, another topic which most Americans probably haven't spent a great deal of time considering. Roy is convincing and writes from the heart in a way very few politicians or politicists do. |
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Review Summary: Your opinion is required |
Date: 2006-07-22 |
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Details: My India-born spouse once described the difference in how he and I had been taught, through subtle societal reward, to make and respond to assertions. "If you say, 'The sky is blue,'" he said, "I think, 'Ann thinks the sky is blue.' But if I say to you, 'The sky is blue,' you say, 'Oh, it is?' You're ready to believe, just because I stated it as fact. That's why you hedge your thoughts with the words, 'I think,' rather than just saying what you think."
I recall that conversation as I read Arundhati Roy's The Cost of Living, in particular, the essay "The Greater Common Good." Because her voice is clear and compelling, my first response is, "Fifty million people have been displaced by ineffective dam-building in India! Good god, what can be done?"
Then I slow down. Remember. "Arundhati Roy thinks that fifty million people have been displaced in India, by dams she thinks are ineffective. Does she make her case?"
She does.
"The Greater Common Good" means to persuade, but its reportage is separable, sentence by sentence, from the argument. Roy's research is compiled, not from debunkable interviews, but from government plans and records, World Bank reviews and estimates of economic benefit and capital cost, and from statistics such as river flow, reservoir levels, areas of irrigated land, numbers of malaria cases, and megawatts of power produced. More than careful, Roy gleefully points out that the Indian government has produced no studies to verify the difference from the lowest baseline calculation of displaced people, or to quantify agricultural benefits gained from completed dam projects.
To follow along, you'll need to work through numbers and a cast of characters, as with any story about accounting and the preservation of power. The payoff to your attentiveness is that once you gather who's done what and at what cost in India's dam-building plans, you are as fully armed as Roy herself to examine the rest of her assertions. You'll have enough facts to agree or disagree with her thesis, "Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people... Let's not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless, and 100 percent manmade."
Roy doesn't leave the American reader the familiar out: "I don't live there. I don't have the right to an opinion." Roy works in facts as well as narrative; you'll be hard pressed to evade responsibility for your assent or dissent from her conclusions. Like this one: "Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) water to 40 million--there's something very wrong with the scale of operations here. This is Fascist math." You can agree or disagree... but reading "The Greater Common Good," you can't wheedle your way out of having a stance.
Two treasures are secreted away inside "The Greater Common Good." One is the story of modern Satyagraha--the practice of nonviolent resistance--how the villagers of the Narmada valley walked into the valley when it was to be flooded, willing to drown. They won a postponement and an independent review of the dam project. The other is a thin, brilliant thread through the narrative: Roy's support of her right as a citizen to research and respond to her government's decisions. It implies the reader has an obligation to respond as well.
In a single sentence, in the heart of the essay, Roy says, "The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard." Her challenge to the reader echoes, unstated: So what do you think of that? What do you think?
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Review Summary: Powerful |
Date: 2004-01-16 |
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Details: This is the first book by Roy that I read, and my favorite. In comparison to The God of Small Things, that's saying a lot. The first essay is the most powerful and clear explanation I have ever read anywhere about the failings of organisations such as the WTO; however, it is not only an attack on international financial institutions. It also discusses the abuses that occur on a national and local level in conjunction with the work of international groups. I suggest this book to anyone who is having trouble understanding the objections to globalization and the WTO. |
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Review Summary: Dams, poverty, and nuclear insanity |
Date: 2003-11-17 |
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Details: This is a short but effective book. It's divided into two parts. In part one, Arundhati Roy writes about dam-building in India. This heavily-footnoted chapter gets a longer treatment in her next book, Power Politics. Here she introduces the topic, adding a lot of context to the statistics. Her outrage is palpable. This leads into the second part, and angry essay about India and Pakistan becoming part of the nuclear fraternity (both countries publicly tested nuclear weapons in May of 1998). Both countries have so many problems --- and so much tension between them over Kashmir --- that this development can only be considered a disaster for the hundreds of millions of people in the region. Arundhati Roy is someone we should all listen to. She's an activist, novelist, and a great writer. This book is a good introduction to her work. |
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out of 18 Reviews
