(Penguin – 193 pages)
Reviewer – Luke Brown
Sometimes a book is published that is virtually unreviewable. Not because it is a mess, but rather [...]

A particularly contentious insult utilised occasionally by some Pathan people, when challenged or insulted, is to point to one’s groin and invite them to “take it”. It is only used rarely, usually when the circumstances are heated and one is willing to back up the challenge, sometimes with their own life. An argument once broke [...]

“Life is slow here,” remarked the thirty-something man next to me, as a cock crowed outside the door of the pharmacy of a friend of his we were in, a few kilometres from the centre of Muzaffarabad. A cow lazily walked by along the dusty path running parallel to the flowing Neelum river nearby, emphasising [...]

Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage Books – 152 pages)
Reviewer – Luke Brown
The reporter studies a photo of a group of men standing on a street in [...]

Before I came to Pakistan I thought that being identified as an Australian might have its drawbacks, due to the war in Iraq. But, as of yet, that has not been the case. Rather, Australia’s ground breaking win in the 2003 Cricket World Cup has been quite the conversation continuer, with a western face the [...]

by Hernando de Soto

(Bantam Press – 243 pages)
Reviewer – Luke Brown
The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. So begins [...]

I dread travelling on buses, particularly in the third world. They invariably stop all the times you don’t need them to and never when you do. To make matters worse, many buses don’t have toilets on them, rest stops seemingly don’t have toilets, even though at times the ones they choose resemble a toilet. So [...]