The month in books

Over a decade after the beginning of the “war on terror,” the language of good versus evil and with us or against us is as unpalatable as it’s ever been. David Cannadine shares the distaste. His latest book, The Undivided Past(Allen Lane, £20), appears to have been spurred by a deep aversion to this sort of binary thinking, both in contemporary politics and among his fellow historians. To divide the world by religion, nation, class, gender, race or—most egregiously, perhaps—“civilisation” is to deeply and dangerously, and sometimes willfully, misunderstand history, he argues. The book is a pleasure thanks to Cannadine’s clear writing and sweeping summary of centuries of (largely western) thought, as well as his sharp dissection of writers ranging from Gibbon to Marx to Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. Of course, embracing “our common humanity” rather than focusing on difference is easiest done from a place of satisfaction and safety; class struggle, independence movements and battles for equal rights have a track record of changing, and often improving, the status quo. Without these frameworks, what will?

To write one novel in second-person narrative may be regarded as a stunt; to write two looks like masochism. Mohsin Hamid has already proved his formal dexterity with The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99), he multiplies the feats. The book is loosely constructed as a literal how-to guide—move to the city, befriend a bureaucrat, and so on—though each chapter soon settles into classical storytelling, narrating the life of a poor boy made good. One senses, however, that here, being a self-made man is about much more than wealth. In a chapter that ruminates on life and death, we are told: “There was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.” On top of the self-help conceit, Hamid adds a second formal trick, universalising his tale by leaving his characters nameless, his places untied to a map. That this enhances rather than detracts from the emotion of the story demonstrates the power of his prose.

Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Orange Prize-winning Half a Yellow Sun, published in 2006, was set in Nigeria, but her short stories since have plumbed the bifurcated existence of African immigrants in the west—people struggling to adjust to new lives abroad even as that adjustment moves them further from home. Americanah (Fourth Estate, £20) lets these themes breathe in the larger space of a novel, as well as taking on the tricky topics of race in America and the UK. Ifemelu, a spirited Lagos native, moves to the US as a young woman and navigates the labyrinthine path to a semi-settled life there, eventually earning a living writing a blog about “American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” Her childhood boyfriend meanwhile tries, and fails, to thrive in Britain. While both stories are movingly and often subtly told, a wider cast of paper-thin characters at times undermines the project.

Adam Rutherford’s Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life (Viking, £20) is a book in two halves. The first sleuths its way back in time and deep into the oceans to probe the moment chemistry first produced biology. The second half studies recent efforts to re-engineer the genetic code. Rutherford, a geneticist, journalist and broadcaster, can get a bit breathless in his descriptions: complex life, we learn, includes “you and me and yeast and snakes and algae and fungus, flowers, trees and turnips.” I found the section on synthetic biology (genetic engineering as an applied science) mystifying, less for the breakthroughs described than the decision to spend large chunks of it making “the case for progress”—a case that critics of GM foods or GM animals will find unconvincing and the rest of us will find unsurprising. But the suspenseful origin-of-life tale is erudite and thrilling.

In Small Wars, Far Away Places (Macmillan, £25), historian Michael Burleigh—author of The Third Reich, which won the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize—traverses the globe in the two decades following the second world war. This, he argues, was a time when American isolationism and distaste for European colonialism gave way to a policy of Soviet containment that ensured the cold war would become a global ideological conflict. The narrative is, by the author’s own admission, geographically and temporally discursive, an arrangement that pleasingly echoes its characters’ peregrinations. In Burleigh’s telling, diplomats, revolutionaries and world leaders alike stepped forward, back and sideways—a shuffle often smoothed, in hindsight and for political purposes, into a more straightforward march. Burleigh, who writes a blog for the Daily Mail and penned an occasionally vitriolic work on terrorism in 2009, is here as ready to acknowledge the cruelty and foibles of western presidents and prime ministers—on the left and right—as he is those of Stalin, Mao or any number of politicians and soldiers trying to throw off their colonial rulers. But for all he admits the Americans at the time were, as a rule, both self-righteous and self-serving, they get many an approving nod.