Book reviews

When secularism is practically a religion, what does it mean to believe, be spiritual, and attempt to see beyond ourselves? Does life have no meaning beyond what we are capable of understanding?

Through personal narrative, journalist, survivor, and activist Shiori Ito examines rape culture in Japan.

By now, you must have heard about the shortlist of the Ako Caine Prize stories for 2021. It includes stellar offerings from Doreen Baingana, Rémy Ngamije, Meron Hadero, Troy Onyango, and Iryn Tushabe. We at Olongo wish them hearty congratulations! Caine Prizewinners and shortlistees have always gone on to become proud names in African literature, from Binyavanga Wainaina to Chimamanda Adichie to Tọ́pẹ́ Fọlárìn, to name a few.

“Lucky,” by Doreen Baingana, is a historical-memoir short story that addresses the subject of war and its devastating effects on human society. The immediate allusion to “Gulu District, West Nile” paints in the reader’s mind the impression of the 1980 insurgency⎯which occurred after Idi Amin was toppled a year earlier⎯and places the story perfectly to the period during the Uganda Bush War, which lasted for nine years from 1980.

Chrissy has a message for the pundits “explaining” what just happened in New York, and Times reporter and researcher Emma Goldberg discusses her new book on the medical students who became doctors in the city in the midst of the pandemic and reads one incredible passage from it.

The most interesting mystery novels don’t announce themselves as such. There is no murder to solve or culprit to apprehend. Rather, events which have no obvious explanation unfold and an air of ambiguity surrounds them. Kiese Laymon’s novel "Long Division" belongs to this category of mystery.

"Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives," edited by Robert Ovetz, aspires to revive the practice of “workers’ inquiry,” as seen in the works of Marx and other socialist thinkers, as a means of allowing workers to examine their material conditions for a better understanding of how they might overcome.

One of the most exciting and stimulating examples of cross-genre amplification...exhilarating.

Gathering around a lazy Susan while sharing bites of squirrel fish was a way to bond with my extended family, the food smoothing over any language barriers between us.

The adult things that we covet shape the adults we become.

Books are markers of a time no longer within reach.

It's no accident that Pola Oloixarac opens the novel with, "Come thirsty."