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...funny what an appetite we have for this kind of hardcore law-porn. Sure, Michael Clayton did it better, but you still get a buzz off of John Grisham's new book The Associate. The late hours, the fluorescent lights, the vicious competition, the fancy perks, the brilliant minds drowning in gallons of coffee and endless reams of paper. God knows they're not having much fun. But we are. It's a Tom-and-Huck scenario: they paint the fence, while we watch and pretend to get tired. Grisham doesn't try to glamorize it - in fact he works...
...Oscar nominations again this year. The voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences don't care that you liked The Dark Knight, which is the second biggest dollar-earner in movie history, and which kids and critics alike appreciated less as a live-action comic book than a triangular battle of stern Good, giggling Evil and two faces in between. Except for a Heath Ledger memorial citation (Supporting Actor), the film was shut out of all major award categories, taking seven other doorstop prizes like Sound Editing and Sound Mixing...
...period whenever she's on screen. (Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood, took three nominations; Eastwood's much superior Gran Torino, none.) It would have made far more sense, though obviously not to the Academy, if she'd been cited as the succulent succubus of the comic-book film Wanted - a true demonstration of star quality.
Ziauddin Sardar has written extensively on Islam, science (he used to be Middle East correspondent for Nature and the New Scientist), postmodernism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism and the complex reconciliation between Muslim belief and modernity. True to form, his latest book, Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience, is a simmering pot of topics that start off as an investigation into the origins of the dish that began life in the curry restaurants of Birmingham, England. It then moves into a historicized and dizzyingly wide-ranging enquiry into the origins, settlement, assimilation and cultures of the subcontinental diaspora...
...genuinely illuminating sections, such as the one on the distinction between Deobandi and Barelvi Muslims and how an appreciation of those differences is vital to understanding the fractious debates about the nature of Islamic fanaticism that has sprung up in the West. It is a shame that the book is let down by a plethora spelling errors and inconsistencies, the lack of endnotes and bibliography, and numerous mistakes in the English transliteration of Urdu and Punjabi words. But then balti itself is something of a hash, and that doesn't stop it from being rather moreish...