What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• The Women’s War, by Sara Corbett in the New York Times. Not all wounds of war leave physical scars. U.S. military women are returning home from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, formerly known as combat fatigue and shell shock.

Henry Bowles

• An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, by Pankaj Mishra. Inspired by a dream, the Indian-born literary prodigy traverses East Asia in search of the historical Buddha. This 400-page travelogue devolves wonderfully into a consideration of Buddhism in terms of contemporary Western philosophy.

Blake Hounshell

• The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, by Bryan Caplan. So much for the “wisdom of crowds,” eh?

Prerna Mankad

• Afghanistan’s Silent Plague of AIDS by Carlotta Gall in the International Herald Tribune. An impending HIV/AIDS epidemic in Afghanistan is being fueled by rising drug use, returning refugees and new immigrants, and the ignorance and stigma about the disease within the country.  See also The Muslim Face of AIDS by Nicholas Eberstadt and Laura M. Kelley in FP‘s July/August 2005 issue.

Carolyn O’Hara

Poor People, by William T. Vollmann. This National Book award winner crisscrossed the globe with one simple question for the strangers he met: Why are you poor? Not bad for a guy who once blew off an Esquire assignment “and went whoring across southeast Asia instead.”

Kate Palmer

A ‘New Deal’ for Latin America, by Mark L. Schneider, Boston Globe, March 14

• A New Golden Age: Russia Looks Forward to Global Warming, by Sonja Margolina, World Politics Watch, March 15