What We Are Reading Today: ‘African Modernism’/node/2606434/books
What We Are Reading Today: ‘African Modernism’
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Updated 14 sec ago
Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘African Modernism’
Updated 14 sec ago
Arab News
Edited by: Manuel Herz
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a large number of central and sub-Saharan African countries gaining independence, and one of the key ways in which they expressed their newly established national identity was through distinctive architecture.
Parliament buildings, stadiums, universities, central banks, convention halls, and other major public buildings and housing projects were built in daring, even heroic designs.
“African Modernism” takes a close look at the relationship between these cutting-edge architectural projects, according to a review on goodreads.com. The book will be of interest to historians of architecture and students alike.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘A Leaf Unturned’: Short story collection explores questions of identity, social constraint
“Saifi is an accomplished writer with a deep understanding of the human condition, particularly when it comes to themes of desire, identity, and societal constraint
Updated 30 June 2025
Arab News
Author: Shamim Saifi
“A Leaf Unturned” is the English translation of a collection of short stories originally written in Urdu by Shamim Saifi, one of India’s leading short story writers.
The stories were originally published by Bihar Urdu Academy under the title “Ek Warq,” and have been translated by Syed Sarwar Hussain, a professor of English at Riyadh’s King Saud University who has translated several books of renowned Indian and Pakistani writers.
Shamim Saifi.
Saifi, who died in 1994 while serving as a High Court judge, demonstrates a deep understanding of the human psyche, particularly in relation to themes of identity, and the struggles of individuals living on the margins of society.
The collection contains 12 short stories, each with a different flavor of writing, but all rich in symbolism and often with a stream-of-consciousness pattern that allows readers to follow each character’s inner thought process.
The stories offer a distinctive kaleidoscope of Joycean surrealism, Kafkaesque existentialism, and Faulknerian symbolism.
Sarwar Hussain writes in his introduction: “Shamim Saifi’s work is marked by its ability to evoke strong emotional responses and its keen insight into the complex intersections between personal desire, societal expectations, and existential crises.
“Saifi is an accomplished writer with a deep understanding of the human condition, particularly when it comes to themes of desire, identity, and societal constraint. His writing is rich in symbolism and emotional resonance, making him a writer whose work invites introspection and reflection.”
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Grasshoppers, Locusts, and Crickets of the World’
Updated 29 June 2025
Arab News
Edited by Martin Husemann and Oliver Hawlitschek
Grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, bush crickets, and katydids make up the order of insects known as Orthoptera.
Although there about 30,000 species of Orthoptera around the world, many people pay little attention to them and even scientists know relatively little about them.
Yet the world of grasshoppers is a fascinating and diverse one.
Written with the perspective of more than half a century of first-hand observation, this unparalleled social and cultural history describes how Costa Rica’s economy, government, education and health-care systems, family structures, religion, and other institutions have evolved, and how this evolution has affected and reflected people’s daily lives, beliefs, and their values.
The authors are particularly concerned with change since the economic crisis of the early 1980s and the structural adjustment that followed.
The book provides a comprehensive introduction to a country the writers know well, according to a review on goodreads.com.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’
Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management
Updated 27 June 2025
Arab News
Authors: Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta
Banks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public plays a key role in deciding what risks are taken as well as how, when, and to what end. Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management.
In “Private Finance, Public Power,” Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta offer a new history of finance and public policy in the US by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide.
Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Conti-Brown and Vanatta describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt
Updated 26 June 2025
Arab News
In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults.
He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences.
