This book was written six years ago. My husband said he was sure I had read it, but I started it anyway after finding a paperback in a hotel in Yangon.

I had not read it, but I am sure glad I did. It’s a remarkable story and I enjoyed it very much.

The Lowland is a sad but fascinating story of an Indian family that takes the reader over four decades and three generations from The Lowland of Calcutta to Rhode Island.

Lahiri is a beautiful storyteller with a instinctive ability to portray both the intimate and far-reaching implications of decisions made, customs and beliefs held dear, and family ties.

Bengali brothers Sabhash and his brother Udayan are so close in age growing up they are nearly inseperable despite their very different personalities. Sabhash the eldest is more conventional with a scientific mind. He wants to be a scientist and heads to America for his college studies. Udayan, always the braver of the two, is distracted, dissatisfied and a rebel.

Udayan’s ideologies find him involved in the Indian Naxalite insurgency and he is executed in front of his parents and wife.

Subhash returns to India to find his parents beyond consoling. Subhash takes Udayan’s wife and the unborn daughter she carries and returns to the USA to raise the child as his own.

The scope of this story is fascinating as it explores family and tradition, parental expectation and truth, martyrdom and secrets and the immigrant experience in the United States. It’s also educational and eye-popping if you are unfamiliar with the brutality and suppression of peasants in India.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Four stars for The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. Read last week’s review of I Am, I Am, I Am.

Shout out to my husband Arne for his first book review. Enjoy.

This is a fascinating read that takes on the subject of how the modern world came to be dominated by the West.  Diamond makes the case that this is not due to any inherent superiority of Western culture or peoples, but was enabled by a combination of random environmental factors present in Eurasia and not in other parts of the world. 

These simple factors included easily domesticated plants and animals, and the geography that allowed for easier communication of new ideas and technologies.  These elements allowed for more dense populations, the formation of states, and the development of superior technologies like written language and boats capable of crossing oceans.  

Another far less intentional key that Diamond explains in great detail is the evolution of epidemic infectious diseases in the West. This came as a result of the close quarters resulting from those more dense populations.  Epidemic disease created an huge unplanned advantage when the Old World began to meet and clash with the New World. As brutal and well-armed as the armies of the Old World were, those diseases killed off far more of the enemy than any weapon.

There are a lot of details and a fair amount of repetitive arguments in this book; it’s a long and fairly dry read. Can you open your mind to the concept that the modern dominance of the West wasn’t achieved through higher intelligence and moral superiority? If you can, you will find interesting this book’s premise that the West’s legacy of a better food supply and inherited tolerance to devastating diseases brought us to where we are today. Diamond’s work may forever change your thinking about how the modern world came to be.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Four stars for Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Read last week’s review of Burmese Days.