About this title: In the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. His own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harcourt
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780151013043ISBN:0151013047
Description: Good. No Dust Jacket. Good Condition. Reasonable wear. Still very usable. Clean, mark-free interior! May have bookstore-related stamps/stickers/marks. Multiple copies may be available. SHIPS W/IN 24 HOURS! FREE INSURANCE on all orders! E-mail notification! Careful, thorough packaging. Fast, personal service. No hassle, full refund return policy! COMBINE SHIPPING-TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER BOOKS/CDs/MOVIES AVAILABLE! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harvest Books
Date Published: 2008-04-14
ISBN-13:9780156034029ISBN:0156034026
Description: Good. Good title in good condition. Pages are clean and tight. Covers show some shelf wear and bumping. Satisfaction guaranteed. If item not as described, return for refund of purchase price. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harcourt
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780151013043ISBN:0151013047
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Very Good. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"I sat down with this book today and read it from cover to cover in less than 5 hours.
Written in a one sided conversationalist tone, Hamid pulls us into the story of Changez and grabs our attention from the first sentence. A 21 year old Princeton graduate, lands his first, major job with a very important NY based employer. With 9-11 as the backdrop, we follow him as he turns from a confident, aggressive young man, to one that is questioning the world around him, and suffering from a heartbreak that may never heal.
Simplistic, honest, straight forward. The words flow off the page at a rapid pace, even though the story itself hasnt that feel of urgency.
The reason it receieved 4 stars versus 5? The ending."
"I read this book while recovering from surgery. When I saw it at the bookstore, it seemed to jump out at me. I think I read it in about 3 days. It details the life of a muslim Pakistani immigrant living in NYC. Changez is Princeton educated and working for a prestigious evaluation firm, he is literally living the 'American Dream'. All that changes for him after 9/11. Because he is Muslim and looks like 'one of them' he is regarded differently now. Where does he belong? He struggles with his identity and his place in the world. He is too americanized to feel comfortable back home and too foreign to feel like he belongs here in the US. What impressed me about the book was how real he was able to write about what it was like in NYC after 9/11. Since I was living there back then, it brought back alot of bittersweet memories for me. He also portrays the inner conflicts that many new immigrants face very honestly and truthfully. I'm sorry to say that life became very difficult for muslims in NYC after 9/11 and he writes about that racial tension with such astounding clarity. I highly recommend this book, the ending is a cliff-hanger!"
"This is a lovely, short, very easy-to-read post 9/11 book.
The structure of this is tale is Changez telling his personal story to a burly American visitor (probably a spook of some sort) to his country, in his function as a guide to Pakistan. The tone was very reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling, at least as far as I recall from my reading of Kipling many years back. Think The Man Who Would Be King. This makes sense given the subject matter of the book, colonialism versus the third world.
Changez, born to fading gentry in Pakistan, has attended Princeton on scholarship, gotten a lucrative job with a top tier financial company, and is in love with beautiful, blond upper-class Yank. Life is good. But when 9/11 happens he discovers that he feels some satisfaction in the great giant being taken down a notch. In the newly paranoid USA, his background marks him as a threat to many and life changes.
Essentially what we have here is a foreigner (Changez) falling in love with America (get it? amERICA), but his amERICA is too damaged by the premature loss of her boyfriend to cancer at age 22 (Read Vietnam or whatever other fall one might choose) to cope. The result of this is that amERICA suffers from extreme nostalgia and becomes incapable of truly embracing Changez (subtle).
Erica's father irks him with presumptions about corruption in Pakistan. He sees a "typically American undercurrent of condescension" (p 55) American indifference to third world concerns is noted repeatedly here. It is no secret that the USA is notoriously unempathetic to the concerns of others since the Marshall Plan.
Fundamentals here are the tools taught him in his finance career (efficiency). Fundamentals are implied for other things, knowing who you are, what your place is in the world. There are, surprisingly, no overt connections made to religious fundamentalism. Presumably one of the author's points is that the values held high in the west (efficiency uber alles) are just as unfeeling and extreme as those of the religious nuts.
I did not take this as a personal tale. It is a metaphoric one. I mean the main character has but a single name, Changez. For that alone, how could the book be anything other than metaphorical? So I was not troubled by the contradictions in the character. For example, Changez feels an affinity with the jeepney driver in the Philippines, yet the choices he makes are all to strive within the western world. He manages to get a scholarship to attend Princeton, but feels it necessary to hide his relative poverty. What? Are there no other scholarship kids at Princeton? He is elitist in his orientation, wanting to hang with the rich kids, wanting to work for the heavy hitter financial company, even after it becomes clear to him that the work will cost people their livelihoods, wanting to be with the crazy girl when it is clear that she is over the edge. It is not America that rejects the foreigner here, but the foreigner who rejects America. So it is not a personal tale. It is a metaphoric one. It would have been better had the walking symbols here been made more reasonable, had their desires and impulses been a little more grounded in flesh and blood reality.
"Overall this book is only soo disappointing in that the first half showed such promise and the second half failed to live up to it.
First half of this book was excellent. The author starts with an interesting device, the narrator, a Pakistani educated in the US now living in Pakistan meeting with some unnamed American--possibly from the government. The stroy is told as a one sided conversation with the narrator occasionally responding to the American (someone else described it as hearing one side of a phone call--which is a pretty accurate description). The narrator is clearly a well thought out character and the story has a subtle, but definet tension--the reader knows something happened to turn the narrator from a US educated/NYC consultant into whatever he is now (we do not know, nor do we know why he is meeting with the American)--The story appears to build as the narrator describes his rise in an NYC consulting firm as well as burgeoning relationship with a wealthy American--The action rises toward of course the inevitbale 9/11---
and then the book completely disappoints. The narrator seemed so well thoughtout that I thought I was in for a really well developed, psychological biography that shows how a Muslim who wanted to enter into the US society, decides to abandon it--How does he react to 9/11? How does he reconcile his own life/goals with a system that he grows to hate? --NOTHING!! We are told he was amused by the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon--this might seem plausible from someone who feels they have suffered because of the US and grown to hate it, but it makes no sense why someone who is working on Wall St. would have this initial reaction...Other than one or two incidents of racial harassment, which appear to be just thrown in, there is no description as to how the narrator continues to interact with his co-workers and his American friends in response to the attacks. The narrator has some comments about global politics, the US role, especially in South Asia, but these sections seem again very quick, almost after thoughts, compared to the more complex/nuance that was given to the novel's earlier descriptions of characters. The second half of the novel appears to be devoted mostly to a love story, which is very distracting from the rest of the novel because the narrator in the love story could have been a completely different character. He is in love with a wealthy American (white) woman, who was born into the highest level of privilege--YET the author does not address how this radical feels about her privilege or how he might have a future with her--would he give up Islam? expect her to convert? --not addressed.
Overall this book is only soo disappointing in that the first half showed such promise and the second half failed to live up to it."
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