A Lamb piece to savour
Christina Lamb is one of the UK’s most highly regarded journalists and accomplished authors.
Since leaving England at the age of 21 with an invitation to a Karachi wedding, Christina Lamb has spent 20 years reporting from around the world. She is one of the UK’s most highly regarded journalists and accomplished authors.
She wrote the best-selling book The Africa House as well as House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe; Waiting For Allah: Pakistans struggle for democracy; and The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years which was runner up as Best Non Fiction book in the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Awards.
Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands, a collection of her reportage, is her most recent book. After Waiting for Allah, and the controversies surrounding the book in Pakistan, this recent offering comes as a breath of fresh air.
In many ways, Lamb has restored her image in the eyes of the Pakistani reader. Many were disillusioned by the Waiting for Allah book more so because it was written a critical time of our history and sided with the anti-democracy forces in the points that it made.
Small Wars is a book written by a more mature and much more grounded Lamb. She talks about her various postings around the world and after reading the accounts of this hard nosed journalist, one comes to a very straight forward conclusion. Things are not all that bad in Pakistan.
Lamb, for example, talks about the viciousness of attacks by robbers on residents in South Africa. She wonders why there is so much violence – how robbers not just enter houses and rob people but also maul them so badly , that too for no reason.
Lamb talks about the rape door which is becoming a must item in South African homes. The door, a metal grill door, which is fixed at the entrance of the master bedroom is done so that when robbers enter the house, they can get access to all parts of the house except the master bedroom because people fear that if the robbers get hold of them, the people are invariably raped or killed or both.
Then there is the story of the street children of Brazil. Because they are such a nuisance and the police has no solution for helping them, the hit squads simply kill these children en masse as the public looks the other way.
The book is an eye opener to the ways of the world and the problems that afflict it, but it also has some good stories. Worth a read.
Published by Harper Press. Price not mentioned.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 11th, 2010.
She wrote the best-selling book The Africa House as well as House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe; Waiting For Allah: Pakistans struggle for democracy; and The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years which was runner up as Best Non Fiction book in the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Awards.
Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands, a collection of her reportage, is her most recent book. After Waiting for Allah, and the controversies surrounding the book in Pakistan, this recent offering comes as a breath of fresh air.
In many ways, Lamb has restored her image in the eyes of the Pakistani reader. Many were disillusioned by the Waiting for Allah book more so because it was written a critical time of our history and sided with the anti-democracy forces in the points that it made.
Small Wars is a book written by a more mature and much more grounded Lamb. She talks about her various postings around the world and after reading the accounts of this hard nosed journalist, one comes to a very straight forward conclusion. Things are not all that bad in Pakistan.
Lamb, for example, talks about the viciousness of attacks by robbers on residents in South Africa. She wonders why there is so much violence – how robbers not just enter houses and rob people but also maul them so badly , that too for no reason.
Lamb talks about the rape door which is becoming a must item in South African homes. The door, a metal grill door, which is fixed at the entrance of the master bedroom is done so that when robbers enter the house, they can get access to all parts of the house except the master bedroom because people fear that if the robbers get hold of them, the people are invariably raped or killed or both.
Then there is the story of the street children of Brazil. Because they are such a nuisance and the police has no solution for helping them, the hit squads simply kill these children en masse as the public looks the other way.
The book is an eye opener to the ways of the world and the problems that afflict it, but it also has some good stories. Worth a read.
Published by Harper Press. Price not mentioned.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 11th, 2010.