Caroline's summer reading list

Well, it's time for yet another summer reading list. This one is brought to you by our fabulous Caroline, who always posts so faithfully on the blog.

Summer Reading List 4

Caroline Anderson, Communications Program Assistant

Guests of the Sheik, by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
What do we really know about Iraq, this country with which the United States is intimately involved? Written in 1965, this “Ethnography of an Iraqi Village” is a memoir, telling the story of Fernea, a young bride who accompanied her sociologist husband to live in an Iraqi village for two years. It is a picture of Iraq unaffected by Saddam Hussein or the United States army.

Salvador, by Joan Didion
In this short novel (only about 100 pages), Joan Didion focuses her shrewd commentary on 1982 El Salvador. She recounts a few weeks spent in the country on assignment for The New York Review of Books. Though the politics of El Salvador are largely ignored today, reading this book offers a good depiction of living with unrelenting terror on a daily basis.

The Plague (La Peste), by Albert Camus
A classic novel about what happens when a disease quarantines the city of Oran, Algeria. How does it relate to FCNL’s work? By raising questions about the role of civil society and what happens when it breaks down.

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