The Looming Tower

September 22, 2015October 15, 2015 / saharalaei / Leave a comment

“The Looming Tower” digs deep into Islamist terrorism, its roots and its evolution up to the momentous day of 9/11. What makes the book fascinating to me, is the story of the core leaders’ “breaking bad” process from their early youth to their final crimes;three men who were instrumental to the formation of the most extreme Jihadi groups.

Sayyid Qutb(1906-1966), Egyptian, Islamic author and theorist, member of the Egyptiam Muslim Brotherhood

Ayman Al-Zawahiri(1951), Egyptian, Surgeon and current Emir of Al-Qaeda.

Osama Bin Ladan(1957-2011), Saudi Arabian/Stateless, former Emir of Al-Qaeda.

I am going to summarize the first half of the book which describes the links between Egyptian, Saudi Arabian, Palestinian and Afghan movements and specifically the above mentioned individuals. I loved this part of the book because it connected a lot of fragmented information I had about the region I grew up in and care a lot about. This part is dedicated to the years that shaped the Jihadi Ideology, prior to the strategic planning for the attack on twin towers.

The second half is the detailed account of the attack’s planning and recruitment, in parallel with FBI and CIA’s investigations of Al-Qaeda, which is super interesting too.

1-Sayyid Qutb

In the late 1940s, Qutb was a fervent Egyptian nationalist and anti-communist, but not yet a fundamentalist. His political and social criticism of the British occupation of Egypt and the King Farouq’s submission, was starting to annoy the government. Before they could arrest him, his friends arranged for his departure to the US to continue his education. Sayyid was in his forties at the time and single. He stated that he couldn’t find a suitable wife among so many immodest women and abstained from sex, as the mere force against salvation. He was often challenging his own motivations and identity, to make sure if he wanted to be a true Muslim or a sinful westerner. The journey to the United States was his final test to shape that firm identity.

He felt lonely in the US, finding himself more sophisticated that Americans who liked to talk about money and Hollywood stars all the time. He was appalled by sexual freedom he observed in New York city and found it to be the root of cultural corruption. Later, in his year-long stay in Greeley, Colorado, he was first charmed by the puritan community he found there. Their abstinence from alcohol and their love for their families and gardens seemed decent. But again, it was also a college town where the majority of students were assertive females, whom Qutb didn’t appreciate. He was also shocked by the racism against African-Americans. He observed that although considered a religious country, materialism was the real American god and the soul had no value. Basically, instead of liberalizing, his American experience radicalized him. His American friends however never noticed the resentment. He reserved his criticism to be published safely back home, where his radical writings would change the minds of Muslim masses about the United States. His criticism was not directed just to the US, but to modernity. “Modern values, secularism, rationality, democracy, individualism and mixing of the sexes had been infecting Islam since the start of colonialism. he intended to show that Islam and modernity were completely incompatible. Separation of religion and state was the barrier to the divine unity of humanity and god. Islam was total and uncompromising.”

When he went back to Egypt, the country was in bad shape. Government corruption and humiliation of the war with Israel had made the ruling system unpopular. Qutb became a member of the “Muslim Brotherhood” immediately. The brotherhood seemed to be the only organization actually caring about the Egyptian people. They built hospitals and schools, even their own army to fight Israel. Their founders rejected the secular ideas of government and politics and they had created their own “society”, based on Islamic “Sharia”. But the main reason they found so much support and membership in Egypt’s lower middle class, was the fact that they effectively opposed the British Occupation. They had a secret apparatus section too that carried out the more violent operations. As early as 1948, they operated numerous attacks on movie theaters and police and judges assassinations.

However, when Gamal Abdel Nasser ceased the government in 1952 through a military coup, Muslim Brotherhood had little part in it. Both the Nasser’s “Modern Arab Socialism”organization and Muslim Brotherhood felt their organizations righteous to rule. “In a story that would repeat again and again in the middle east, the contest quickly narrowed to the choice between a military society and a religious one.” Nasser prevailed in the beginning and appeased to Muslim Brotherhood by inviting them to the advisory council. But the vast doctrine difference between the two left little room for compromise. For example when Nasser was negotiating a treaty with the British to end the occupation, Qutb published an article urging Egyptians to Jihad against them.

In 1954, Muslim Brotherhood attempted to assassinate him, but failed. Nasser retaliated by hanging six members and imprisoning thousands in concentration camps. Qutb was one of the prisoners. Tortured and mistreated in prison, Qutb re-introduced the Takfir idea, by deeming his prisoners non-Muslim due to their behavior towards their Muslim behavior, hence giving real muslims permission to kill hum. Then he issued his ultra-radical doctrine from prison, “The Milestones”, a book that became the bible of Jihadis. ” The world divides in two camps: Islam and Jahaliat(the period of barbarity that existed before Muhammed). Pure primitive Islam or the doom of mankind are the only choices.” With the help of Saudi Arabia, Qutb led the regeneration of the Brotherhood’s secret apparatus to form another assassination plan, . His plot was revealed by captured members and he was sentenced to death. Before carrying out the execution, streets filled with protests and Nasser realized Qutb would be more dangerous dead than alive. He sent a message to Qutb that if he would appeal his sentence, he would spare him. But Qutb wanted to become a martyr and became one, inspiring thousands of young Jihadis to avenge him.

2-Ayman al-Zawahiri

Ayman was born in an old and prominent Egyptian family. His father’s family were all top rated doctors, judges and lawyers. They were also very influential in the most credible Islamic school in the world, Al-Azhar. His mother’s side was equally famous with opposition politics. One of Ayman’s maternal uncles was Qutb’s personal lawyer. Young Ayman heard repeatedly glorified stories of Qutb from his uncle. Ayman was a headstrong, self-righteous and rebellious against the authority in power. He was extremely disciplined and organized as a teenager, preventing him from acting impulsive and irrational upon his beliefs. At the age 15, he formed an underground cell dedicated to over-throw of Nasser government and initiating an Islamic state.

Around the same time(1967), Israel’s decisive victory in the 6 day war humiliated Muslims of the Arab world which made Arabs believed that God was on Israel’s side. They lost faith in their countries and governments. Mosques all over Muslim countries united their voices:” God had turned against the Muslims and the only way to get back to him was to return to the pure Islam.” The primary target for the Egyptian Islamist was then the Nasser impure and semi-religious regime first, and after establishing a pure islamic state, confronting the west and Israel.

Nasser’s successor, Anvar Sadat, desperate to make his rule legitimate, tried to make peace with Islamists. He freed all the Muslim brotherhood prisoners ignoring their radicalization influenced by Qutb and the threat they proposed to his government. “The Islamic Group” formed after Anvar Sadat’s support, and quickly radicalized most of Egypt’s schools and campuses.

In 1980, Zawahiri, then a young practicing doctor was preoccupied with the problem of finding a secure base for Jihad, which wasn’t possible in Egypt. He volunteered to provide medical help to Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. He went back to Egypt after 4 months and became one of the leaders of the group “Egyptian Islamic Jihad”. In the meantime, in Egypt, Sadat’s peace agreement with Israel and his wife’s help to enforce a law granting women the right to divorce enraged Islamists. They responded by Takfiring him, meaning they characterized him as a heretic, therefore an open invitation to his assassination(Takfir doctrine later became a very common tool for extremists like Zawahiri to justify murdering muslims). Sadat then dissolved all religious student associations. Zawahiri started planning for a complete overthrow of the government, by recruiting Egyptian military officers like Al-Zumar.

In September 1981, “The Islamic Group” hired an assassin who shot and killed Sadat. The new government of Hosni Mubarak, arrested all the conspirators, including Zawahiri. They were then imprisoned in a 12th century dungeon and sadistically tortured. “Egypt prisons became factories for producing militants whose need for retribution(they called it justice) was all-consuming”. Under torture, Zawahiri pointed fingers to his friends, which was further humiliating for him. In 1985, after doing his term, Zawahiri moved to Jeddah, Saudi to work in a hospital as a surgeon. He had now officially turned into an extremist.

3- Osama Bin Ladan

Osama was the only child of Mohammad Bin Ladan and his fourth wife. His Father was a self made Arab billionaire originally from Yemen, who made a fortune with his construction company by implementing Saudi Arabia’s most grand building projects. When Osama was still a young child, his father divorced his mother and married her off to one of his staff, as was his habit. According to his childhood best friend “Osama was a shy and calm boy, almost girlish.”. He loved watching western movies on TV. In his teenage years he changed though. Under the influence of a charismatic Syrian teacher, he went through a political and religious awakening. He stopped watching American shows and wearing western clothes, and became intensely passionate about Palestinian cause. He would wake up at 1 am to pray in addition to the 5 daily prayers. “Many young Saudis found refuge in intense religiosity, being exposed to so few alternative ways of thinking, even about Islam.”

At the age seventeen, he joined Muslim Brotherhood and married his fourteen year old second cousin. The members of Muslim Brotherhood were not plotting against Saudi government, but met secretly discussing the formation of a real Islamic state, somewhere in the world. In his first years at the university, Osama and his brotherhood friends met for soccer and horse riding in the dessert, they also read an discussed Saeed Qutb’s books and were greatly influenced by him.

Unlike his father, Osama was a caring and attentive father to his children. He was very stern to them too, going out of his way to toughen them up for the cruel world. he took them camping in the dessert and made them dig and cover themselves with sand and sleep under the stars. He also home-schooled all his children by hiring tutors to supervise all their schooling. Osama and his best friend pledged to practice “Fair polygamy”, at the time that polygamy was socially unacceptable in Saudi. Osama married his second wife in 1982, a highly educated woman with a PHD in child psychology. He eventually would marry two other women.

Still in university, Osama met Sheikh Abdollah Azam, a Palestinian Islamic scholar who was at the time preaching to recruit Muslims to help the Afghan Mujahideen in war against the Soviets. He was the warrior-priest type leader that Osama had been looking for. He was both pious and fierce, with his slogan being:” Jihad and the rifle alone, no negotiation, no conferences, no dialogues.” Azam had been to Afghanistan and had many tales about pre-modern Mujahideen troops defeating mechanized Soviets with the help of God’s miracles. According to his preaching, the struggle was between Islam and Jahelia(any system existing before or other than Islam). This was why Saudi and other Arab volunteers who couldn’t care less about Afghanistan as a country, joined this Jihad. He used Bin Ladan’s guest apartment for recruiting sessions. He was impressed by Osama’s humble lifestyle, who lived with minimum house furniture and didn’t even use his Air Conditioning. “On the other hand he would write a million Rials check for Mujaideen, if need be.”

Abdullah Azam

In 1985, Afghan Mujahidin consisted of many disorganized armed militias. ISI(Pakistan) and Saudi Arabia tried to organize them in 7 main parties. One of them was a Bin Ladan founded group headed by Afghan Abdorasoul Sayyaf, Called “Etehad Eslami”. Bin Ladan and Azam were also part of the group’s leadership. According to his subordinates at the time, Bin Ladan was not a charismatic leader. Overshadowed by Azam’s power and eloquence, Bin Ladan is remembered as shy and naive. When asked to talk for a group of Mujahidin, he talked about nothing but horses, one witness recalled.

Despite his leadership flaws, Bin Ladan was an excellent employer for young unemployed Arabs. He paid for their ticket and accommodation in Pishavar and paid them a handsome salary for their participation in Jihad. The main difference between Arab Mujahidin and their Afghan counterparts was that Afghans were fighting for their countries, but Arabs were there for martyrdom. Inexperienced Arab fighters were also quite a liability to Afghan mujaheddin, who found them useless in battle. In response, Bin Ladan started an Arab-only camp to prove their capabilities. After a few miserable defeats, Arab camp finally succeeded in one battle against Russians which boosted their confidence.

Around the same time, Bin Ladan met Zawahiri in Jedda and they immediately clicked. Each of them filled a need in the other. Zawahiri needed money and contacts, and Bin Ladan sought ideological direction, which Zawahiri as a seasoned propagandist supplied. Zawahiri joined Bin Ladan’s group in Afghanistan and from the beginning had ideological disagreements with Azam. Azam had an all inclusive vision of Jihad which was opposed to Zawahiri’s Takfeeri ideas. Azam was not trusted by Saudi government financiers to lead Arab Mujahidin, as much as Bin Ladan was. He was undermined and eventually assassinated in a car bomb. In 1988, Bin Ladan and Zawahiri founded Al-Qaeda together, based on their own idea of Islamic Jihad.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

August 14, 2015August 14, 2015 / saharalaei / 3 Comments

I think of myself as an Omnivore, both physically and intellectually. I eat a bowl of salad as passionately as I chew a crispy bacon, and I like to hear the arguments about feeding billions as much as those of animal rights. That being said, this book was perfect for my food choice dilemma.

The author structures the book into four main food chains, each of which he personally explores from start to end:

Industrial
Industrial organic
Beyond organic
Personal(hunting and foraging)

In this blog I am going to mainly summarize 1-3, since those are the practical ways that most of us can feed ourselves.

Industrial

The backbone of the industrial food chain in the US is undoubtedly the industrial corn. Fifty percent of an average Americans human biomass, can be traced to corn consumption. We know this thanks to corn’s unique carbon signature. This is much higher than an average Mexican. See below other fun facts about corn.

But is there anything wrong with this? Isn’t Corn is delicious and nutritious? The author first addresses the question of how corn became so dominant in the US and along the way we understand how this domination affects us, on an individual and global level. There are a few biological advantages of the corn crop that makes it superior to other grains in terms of quick and easy yield, but the US surplus of corn really started after the introduction of Nitrogen-based fertilizers in 1920s. This type of fertilizer is a product of petroleum and was the force behind the “Green Revolution”, which saved millions from starvation around the world. By 1930s there was so much corn surplus in the US that the price of corn plummeted to its lowest, and the Government had to step in and save the farmers from bankruptcy. I tried to illustrate the timeline of politic and economic ups and downs of corn production in an infograph. Long story short, the Government was supporting the farmers in the beginning, but later in the century when bigger players like food processing companies started lobbying, regulations shifted to support them instead of farmers. As a result, corn production increased drastically and corn market prices decreased, making it the most efficient commodity food for the food industries to make money off of.

Economical History Of Corn

Along the way small farmers were forced to convert their diverse-crop farms to huge corn/soy farms and their grass-based animal farms to CAFOs(Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) that feeds the cattle with corn. Here is a diagram of what the whole chain works.

Pollan actually bought a calf and followed it through his short life from the first few months of happy grass eating with his mom, to his stinky CAFO period. But what’s so wrong about a CAFO?

Bacteria: Cows are not evolved to eat corn. Eating corn makes them bloat painfully. It also causes excessive acid in their rumen, creating dangerous bacteria like e-coli. If not treated by antibiotics and other medication, they would die from diseases, before slaughter. Overuse of antibiotics, develop antibiotics resistant bacteria which eventually find their way to our bodies and there is no cure for them.
Malnutrition: Corn fed beef contains significantly higher amounts of saturated fat compared to grass-fed. In fact the heart disease problems associated with red meat are specific to corn fed beef. It also has much less Omega3.
Toxic waste: CAFOs waste is not usable for compost or agricultural use due to its high levels of hormone, heavy metal and Nitro/Phosphate chemicals. The waste finds its way into the bodies of water, poisoning the environment.
Hormones: An accumulated amount of the growth hormones injected to industrial cattle, can cause infertility and hormon disorders in humans.
Petroleum use: It takes 35 Gallons of oil to produce enough corn for raising one industrial cow.

2. Industrial Organic

In this chapter, the author digs into the Organic food in its current grocery store distribution. Starting his journey in a whole Foods supermarket and reading Organic stories on labels, to some of the biggest suppliers of these organic products in California. Pollan argues that the perception given by the Organic food’s marketing is deceptive. A lot of Whole Foods customers imagine a utopia in which they live in perfect harmony with numerous small farms and happy animals. The reality is that Organic farming regulations don’t enforce that utopia. In fact, Whole Foods buys from a handful of organic mega farmers. True, those farms substitute chemical fertilizer and pesticides with organic compost which is much less harmful to the land and the consumer. But it does have other ecological disadvantages. Large organic farms need constant tilling and weeding, which releases a great amount of nitrogen to the air and requiring large amounts of compost, needed to be shipped in tons from overseas and cross-country.

As to organic animals, government organic regulations don’t mandate cattle to be raised outside Cafos or eat grass. As long as a cow eats “Organically farmed corn”, its meat and milk is considered Organic. The worst part is the origin of “Free Range” eggs and organic chicken meat. Those chickens live a very similar life to their non-organic industrial farm chickens. The “Free Range” means that in their CAFO, they have a narrow door leading to a small grassy yard, which stays shut for the first 6 weeks of the chicken’s life and they are slaughtered 2 weeks after it opens. None of them practice this freedom, after 6 weeks of confinement.

Here is a summary of the industrial Organic food advantages and disadvantages:

Environment: Industrial organic farms don’t harm the soil by adding chemicals to it, but they do break the ecological cycle of the soil by planting mono culture and remove the natural Nitrogen by over-tilling.
Nutrition: Organic plants are proven to be more nutritious than plants grown with aid of chemical fertilizer. Basically, a plant’s struggle to fight pests is one of the important factors in the development of its nutritious elements.
Petroleum use: Organic food industry is not sustainable from energy perspective. The long distance transportation of huge amounts of compost and the non-local supply chain of organic food is more energy-intensive than industrial food.

3. Beyond Organic

Beyond Organic is the food chain that the author next explores and finds the most healthy and sustainable. As a successful model, he explores the Polyface farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, managed by Joel Salatin, .

http://www.polyfacefarms.com. Joel Salatin

Joel calls his agricultural method “Grass farming”, utilizing the latest scientific methods to grow, rotate and graze grass, creating a full ecological circle within his productive farm. The circle starts with grass, feeds a variety of animals and ends as compost that feeds the same pasture of grass.

The cows only feed on grass and hay(in winter). The chickens get a large part of their food from eating grass and the worms from the cow manure, sanitizing the pasture. The pigs are used as the farm’s compost machine as described by Joel:” When we feed hay to the cows, they eat and lounge in a pole shed that we bed down with wood chips, sawdust, and old hay to absorb the excrement. This bedding ferments in the anaerobic conditions created by the heavy cows walking on it. Added corn ferments and offers a tasty salary for pigs to aerate the bedding–hence PIGAERATOR. The oxygenation turns the entire deep bedding into a compost pile, which is the backbone of the farm’s fertility program. During the summer and fall, the pigs are in special savannah pastures rotated every few days with electric fence.”

Ok, we may argue that the above mentioned farm output is mainly animals products and a lot of energy is wasted when we eat an animal, instead of a plant. But if all that energy is from the sun, “That meal comes as close as it can get to a free lunch.” And instead of diminishing the soil it enriches it.

Sustainability of Polyface farm doesn’t stop at production. The farm doesn’t ship food long distance. They distribute their products locally to nearby restaurants, farmers markets and direct to consumers at the farm or online “Metropolitan buying club”. In Joel’s view this is a start of a movement that can reform food economy, with consumers who are willing to go into trouble and expense of buying from farmers they know.

I actually tried to buy our meat and eggs for a month from a farm rather than a store. It cost about 20% higher. Sounds a lot? Well, for us it translates to maximum $40 per month. That amounts to one happy hour for two, a movie night with popcorn, or a pair of pants. And if that means more nutritious food, helping local farmers and healing our environment I am more than happy to pay that premium.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

July 24, 2015July 24, 2015 / saharalaei / Leave a comment

This is a book that I’m glad to have heard rather than read, because David Sedaris is a great narrator and performer and I love his North Carolina accent impressions. This is the first David Sedaris Book that I’ve listened to and when I don’t want to listen to the radio in my car, I always enjoy playing it back for the tenth time. The jokes are clever and subtle and he is a good storyteller. Like many other comedians his humor is mostly a self-deprecating autobiography, but what’s unique about him is that he is really good at shifting from tragedy to comedy. When he talks about his troubles as a lisping gay 12 year old, you do feel sorry for him being such a misfit in school, but right when it is getting too bitter, he adds a witty twist to the situation and makes you laugh.

The most funny parts of the book are the stories about his eccentric family members, especially his dad. I also love the French class piece where he makes fun of the mean French teacher that dissuades him from learning French all together. That really resonates with me, because I had a similar experience in Germany. There is a funny part where the christian French language students try to explain Easter to a Moroccan classmate:

“it is a party for the little boy of god, who calls his self Jesus and…” “and he die one day on two morsels of lumber”. “he die one day and then he go above my head to live with your father. He weared of himself the long hair and after he die the first day, he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.He nice, the Jesus.He make the good things and on Easter we sad because somebody make him dead today.”

He is by no means a laugh out loud type of comedian. Yet, he has a way of writing about his boring peculiarities and make them sound interesting. Like the fact that after living in Paris for so many years, he hasn’t visited the Louvre or Notre Dame and his favorite pastime is sitting in a movie theater, because movie theaters are still popular and respected in Paris. Maybe I like his work, because I am sometime as weird as he is and would like to make my stories as marketable as he does!

Man’s Search For Meaning

July 23, 2015July 23, 2015 / saharalaei / Leave a comment

This is a profound and straightforward read that sheds light on life’s most essential questions. It is like a psychological and philosophical handbook that both religious and atheists can use, and a terminally ill person can be inspired by. It is a breath of fresh air at modern times when years of Freudian psychology and pleasure oriented pop culture has shaped our identities, failing to prepare us to deal with inevitable tragedies of life.

The first half of the book is Dr Frankl’s personal account of his years in WWII concentration camps. This part is like no other holocaust story, as the author puts it:” this isn’t the story of big horrors of those camps, but the smaller horrors told over and over again”. It is basically an account of how the prisoners reacted and dealt with those atrocities on a day to day basis, hence a psychological study of the camp. The prisoner goes through different phases. In the beginning it is shock, as they are stripped of all their belonging, reduced to a shaved naked existence and a prison number. This shock is accompanied by a certain curiosity of wanting to know how much worse it can get.

The second phase of the prisoners reactions start once they are well integrated with the camp life, which is only achieved after months of physical and verbal abuse and malnutrition. At this phase, the inmate has acquired enough apathy to keep eating his bowl of watery soup while watching a friend’s frostbitten toes being clipped by the camp doctor. This defense mechanism was necessary for survival, so that the inmates remaining energy was fully focused on saving his life and others close to him, forcing their inner world to a more primitive state. However, Frankl observes that the more spiritual and sensitive the inmates, the better they coped with this stage. They were able to draw back from the harsh external realities and find a safe place within themselves for refuge. It could be religious faith or love for another human being, in Frankl’s case. At the end Frankl makes the crucial clarification:” I may give the impression that the human being completely influenced by his surroundings. But what about human liberty? Isn’t there any spiritual freedom in regard to behavior to any given surroundings? The experience of camp life, shows that man does have a choice of action. He remembers men giving away their last pieces of bread. They may be few, but still sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And there were always choices to make. Choices which determined whether or not you would submit to those powers threatening to rub you from your very self and inner freedom.” To be worthy of their suffering. This is the essence of this book and the idea that Frankl’s Logotherapy theory stems from.

In the second half of the book, “Logo-therapy” is explained more theoretically, but with frequent references to the first half. The author argues that mental health is based on a tension between the meaning one has realized and the meaning he still needs to fulfill, as opposed to a tension-less state which is the goal in some other schools. The meaning is unique per person and shouldn’t be generalized as “the meaning of life”. Each person is responsible to find and fulfill the meaning life asks of him. Frankl talks about three main areas in which one can find their meaning:

1-Achievement, as a professional success or a meaningful service

2-Experience, as the experience of love for another person

3-Suffering. He insists that “suffering is NOT necessary to find meaning, but meaning is possible even in spite of suffering, provided that suffering is unavoidable. If the suffering is avoidable, the meaning could be found in the struggle to remove the cause of suffering.”

He also challenges the United states culture of “Pursuit of happiness”, arguing that similar to orgasm, the stronger one’s intention for happiness, the harder it is to experience it. Forceful pursuit of happiness in another words, is a fun-spoiler. Happiness would ensues a person’s realization of meaning of their life.

I recommend this book for anyone who is weary of Freudian psychology or is interested in a person’s responsibility to the world and their own life.

Middlesex

May 27, 2015May 27, 2015 / saharalaei / Leave a comment

How would you write a novel about a hermaphrodite growing up in the 60s and 70s? How would you go about involving your readers with the protagonist’s emotions and fate? Would you start with her childhood and girly roles she had to play, charm readers with her innocence and happiness, and then shock them in the middle of the book with the difficult discovery at her puberty? That’s one way to do it for sure, but it wouldn’t have worked for me. It wouldn’t have made me savor every chapter of the book, the way Eugenides has.

He instead tells a condensed version of Calliope Stephanides’ sexual identity, right in the first page of the book in first person. He is a handsome man attracted to women, with whom he can not have sex or even get naked because he doesn’t have a normal penis. His frank and humorous account of his fate in the beginning of the book is a powerful core that dictates the color and themes of the rest of the book. From now on, everything happens to make a mutated gene find its human body.

The story starts in Asia minor, amidst an ongoing conflict with Turks led by Ata Turk. The theme in this part of the book is very much like Marquez’s Magical Realism in 100 years of solitude, with a more humorous tone. And just like 100 years the ancestors are guilty of a sin that would eventually create a weirdo, remember the iguana child at the end of that book? Despite the bizarre and horrible things that happen in this chapter, the couple’s sweetness and passion for survival charms us. We want the characters to get away from burning Smirna and get to America, forget their past and start a new life.

Next comes a beautiful depiction of immigrant life in the 20s and 30s in Detroit. Our lovely Greek couple do anything to fit in in their new country. There is a brilliant scene of a Henry Ford workers graduation show, in which immigrant workers dressed in their native clothing walk into a symbolic “Melting Pot” and come out in gray and blue suits. Desdemona fakes being half Muslim despite her hatred for Turks to find a job as a silk maker for a group of people whose identity I don’t want to reveal and spoil the fun for you. The way the author lets us glide through the historical context of these years through these weird and sweet Greek couple and then their children, is enjoyable and powerful. We see the world war II through the love story of Calliope’s parents, and civil rights movements through Calliope as a young girl.

All along this engaging and eventful generational story, there is another layer of narrative about the genes, birth, eggs and sperms, which is as interesting and compelling, thanks to the writing. There are great analogies used to give meaning to the underlying biological event that’s about to happen. The whole story is compared to a cocoon from Desdemona’s silk worm box that Calliope needs to reel to find the answers. The way these two layers are connected, is what makes Calliope’s life bearable and take away some of his loneliness. The way he finds a long thread of love and suffering in his past, both leads to his fate and lightens up his burden. As he once says he is in search of Einheit, like Berlin.