Globalization and Its Discontents

TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and BeyondBy Pankaj Mishra Picador. 323 pp. $15

In 1988, writer Pankaj Mishra lived for a few months in Benares, an Indian city in which "the chess games in the alleys, the all-night concerts in temples, the dancing girls at elaborately formal weddings, the gently decadent pleasures of betel leaves and opium formed an essential component." Soon much of that was gone, replaced by "a rash of fast-food outlets, video game parlors, and boutiques, the most garish symbols of the entrepreneurial energies unleashed by the liberalization of the Indian economy." More than a decade later, Mishra traveled through South and Central Asia, "through countries that differ radically from each other in many ways but that seem to face the same dilemma: How do peoples with traditions extending back several millennia modernize themselves?"

THE HEARTLESS STONE A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and DesireBy Tom Zoellner Picador. 340 pp. $15

When Tom Zoellner's fiancee returned the engagement ring he had carefully picked out for her, he became obsessed with finding out where diamonds come from. He tracked the sparkling rocks to the Central African Republic, where "they were hidden in the sands, in the ghost riverbeds, millions of them, an otherwise useless pebble that had no place in the cultural history or spiritual tradition of the region, but one that the white men valued supremely and were willing to pay rewards that far surpassed any other." From there Zoellner traveled to Japan, where the diamond company De Beers created a market for the gems, to South Africa, where the cartel has its headquarters. He finishes his journey in the United States, where a couple can't truly be bound to each other without a diamond ring, no matter how many bloody African wars it has funded.

ROTTEN ENGLISH A Literary AnthologyEdited by Dohra Ahmad Norton. 535 pp. $15.95

This collection of short stories, poetry, essays and novel excerpts, writes scholar Dohra Ahmad in her introduction, "celebrates the stunningly unanticipated ways in which English has changed as it grew into a global language." All of the works here have been written "in linguistic codes that are primarily spoken rather than written, and also ones that have generally been perceived as having a lower status than Standard English." The cultures and time periods represented here are truly broad, from Mark Twain's short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" to an excerpt from Uzodinma Iweala's recent novel, Beasts of No Nation, about child soldiers in an unnamed African country. Roughly a billion people speak English today and, as this anthology demonstrates, they do so in infinite and rich variety.

From Our Previous Reviews

· Talk Talk

(Penguin, $14), T.C. Boyle's novel about identity theft "is so perfectly aligned with the day's news that the FBI should search his house for stolen credit cards," suggested Ron Charles.

· In Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage, $14.95), Bill Buford "never directly explains why the chef's life seemed so irresistible to him, but he shows you, page by delicious page, why the whole enterprise is so seductive," reported Warren Bass.

· Wendy Smith extolled Kiana Davenport's "passionate conviction and her masterly ability to evoke the social and physical topography of her native Hawaii" in her novel House of Many Gods (Ballantine, $13.95).

Rachel Hartigan Shea is a senior editor at Book World.