Little Bee - there's nothing "little" about this powerful novel

This is one of the most moving books I've read this year. It reaches in and grabs hold of you and won't let go. I found myself examining my own life choices, could I have made different decisions that would have impacted the people around me more, or less? The harsh and sometimes difficult material is bathed in straightforward prose, so much so that it sneaks up on the reader. Often one finds oneself with an unconscious hand over mouth in stunned review as you keep on reading, unable to turn away. You'll emerge with a greater awareness of our world, and maybe even a bit of change to your own world view, on the themes of violence, immigration, friendship, and the power of one person to impact them all.

From the Washington Post Review: "Little Bee" deserves a warning label: "Do not judge this book by its cover. Contents under pressure." Despite the cutesy title (the book was more sensibly published in Britain as "The Other Hand") and the coy book-flap description ("It is a truly special storyand we don't want to spoil it"), "Little Bee" will blow you away.

Like Ian McEwan's propulsive novel "Enduring Love," in which a fatal hot-air balloon accident binds together two strangers who witness it, "Little Bee," by Guardian columnist Chris Cleave, hinges on a single horrific encounter. On a beach in Nigeria, the lives of Little Bee, a teenager from a small village, and Sarah O'Rourke, editor of a posh British women's magazine, are brought into brutal conjunction. Little Bee and her older sister have the misfortune to live on valuable Nigerian oil deposits, for which their family pays a deadly price. Sarah and her husband, heedless tourists out for a walk in the sand, are confronted in an instant with a choice: Save the girls at great personal cost or ignore them.

'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online

Just the latest lament on how the internet is making us all incapable of deep thought:
(from the npr article)

June 2, 2010

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

Chronic Distraction

Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate.

"I'd sit down with a book, or a long article," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, "and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check e-mail, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page."

Carr admits he's something of a fatalist when it comes to technology. He views the advent of the Internet as "not just technological progress but a form of human regress."

Human ancestors had to stay alert and shift their attention all the time; cavemen who got too wrapped up in their cave paintings just didn't survive. Carr acknowledges that prolonged, solitary thought is not the natural human state, but rather "an aberration in the great sweep of intellectual history that really just emerged with [the] technology of the printed page."

Read the whole article

The Internet, Carr laments, simply returns us to our "natural state of distractedness."