A powerful collection of speeches by Arundhati Roy! The only downfall is it's repetition of key points. Even so, each chapter is beautiful, hard-hitting, inspiring and full of anti-imperialist, action-oriented information.

The words of Arundhati Roy in An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire removes the demobilizing fog from the glass and demystifies corporate media, neoliberalism and war politics and puts modern day empire in a global and historical context.

Full of sarcasm, poetics and witty metaphor, Roy does not sugar coat the dire need for the American people to act.

A MUST-READ for ALL! A truly important book in understanding the current (and horrific) imperial moment.

Somehow, I've never read Noam Chomsky (I don't know how they let me into grad school). Roy is obviously a follower of his, and her book really jolted me. I read it in India, which made the impact even stronger. I was especially affected by the essays on how Big Dams have hurt villagers and the environment, and the way their protests have been ignored. Now I'd like to read Power Politics

"...understand that for most people in the world, peace is war – a daily battle against hunger, thirst, and the violation of their dignity. Wars are often the end result of a flawed peace, a putative peace. And it is the flaws, the systemic flaws in what is normally considered to be "peace," that we ought to be writing about." (15–16)

Roy's exposure of how White Men still collude to spread their imperialism throughout the world.

The best social justice writer of our times

Neat lil book of essays from the mid 2000s mostly about American imperialism and Indian fascism. Obviously a little dated but it’s interesting to see something like the Iraq war, which I experienced first as a 5 year old and then later as a historical event, analyzed as it was happening.

I'm not sure why this book didn't hit for me as hard as Arundhati Roy works usually do. But it was a good time capsule reminder of the horrors of Narendra Modi and the 'War on Terror.'

I've previously only read Arundhati Roy's fiction and had been waiting to try her larger body of non-fiction writing. I enjoyed this collection of essays much more than I expected to primarily because of how well she weaves countless well researched statistics and facts in a compelling, larger narrative, enriched by a consistent tone of biting sarcasm barely containing her fury against Empire in all its avatars. This collection has been written from a leftist perspective and I'm not sure I know enough about these issues to judge whether that is a merit or a disadvantage, but ideology aside, her arguments by themselves are thought provoking and are well worth considering. I found The Road to Harsud particularly moving and heart wrenching in its details of how an entire town is dismantled for fear of submersion by the waters of a dam. I did however bump this down from a 5 to a 4 star read because of many repetitions in terms of quotes and phrases which I can understand are inevitable in a collection of different forms of non fiction written by one person (i.e. essays, speeches, opinion pieces) but found jarring nonetheless.

It only got four stars because it is, literally, a collection of writings and speeches that can all be accessed for free online. I would suggest buying it, to support independent, left-wing press, but there is something about reprinting free materials that I simply cannot give five stars to.

As always, Arundhati Roy is sharp and incisive, and her writing is beautifully poetic and immensely percussive at the same time. If I could write like her... I wouldn't be writing reviews of books on Goodreads!

Not for entertainment but so amazingly interesting particularly if you have a slight insight into India or the country's history. It clearly explains partition; the gutless division of India by British imperialists in a blind attempt to "fix" what they had already stuffed up. Long live post colonial writers :)

definitely a well-written and thoughtful book but a bit dated as it refers to the politics of the Bush Junior Administration.

An ordinary person’s guide to empire is a collection of essays or mostly speeches delivered by Arundhati Roy at many places on many occasions and deals with the topics she has started crusade against like neoliberalism, neoimperialism, corporatization of media, government and the globalization itself, injustice, displacement, war and aggression, and many more. Her sense of urgency in all these addresses is quite infectious and one feels like going out and participate in the causes she champions for. She has data to back up her claim, narrative to share of utter injustice and depravation, places and people to lend credibility to her theories. Since these are speeches, they sound a bit exaggerated and appear designed to draw applause and claps at regular intervals. Lots of facts, theories and arguments get repeated across the chapters and as a reader I felt a kind of déjà vu. Nonetheless, one cannot miss the well-argued theories and propositions put forward by her. She puts an alternative view which I think one should know to get a complete picture of the socio-politico-economic scenario of the contemporary world. In an increasingly globalized world changing at a faster rate than any time in the history, it is not always possible to get grip on our own existence, let alone those of others. Intellectuals like Ms. Roy makes us pause and forces us to ponder over the price of inequality we are ready to pay. It is not that all her claims are fullproof but to counter them, one should not resort to calling her pseudo-intellectual, attention seeker or worse Indophobic.

While reading the book, I was tempted to read it aloud on the cost of getting misconstrued as a wannabe leader by my colleagues, still I did it. A speech will make more sense if read aloud than perusing it in the cosiness of our bed, wont it? In the book, Ms. Roy essentially exhorts to take part in “real resistance” and I recall how I did my bit by repressing the urge to spit on a railway platform!