Bettie's Books

bookshelves: winter-20142015, published-2014, radio-4, nonfiction, autobiography-memoir, essays

BOTW

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04sttd9

Description: These timely 'dispatches from Lahore, New York and London' encompassing memoir, art and politics, collect the best essays of the award-winning author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid.

Hamid makes a compelling case for recognising our common humanity while relishing our diversity, for resisting the artificial mono-identities of religion or nationality or race, and for always judging a country or nation by how it treats its minorities as 'Each individual human being is, after all, a minority of one'.
Read by Sanjeev Bhaskar
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill

In this first episode Hamid muses on his fractured youth, growing up in Lahore and California, and the creation of language, art and identity in different locations.

Peripatetic author Hamid relocates to London to pursue his career and eventually finds love in the city with his wife and baby daughter. But Lahore, city of his birth, is calling...

Back in Lahore, rising young author Mohsin Hamid gets to grip with the writer's solitary life, and, inspired by writers he loves, develops both his craft as a writer - and his fitness.

Hamid recounts his experience of Islamophobia both pre and post 9-11, and considers the fearsome consequences of terrorism and the death of Bin Laden on his country.

In two essays, author and journalist Mohsin Hamid considers his country's - and its Asian neighbours' - history and progress, on the occasions of Pakistan's 60th and 65th birthdays.

Preferred his essays to his novels

1* The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2* How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
3* Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London