The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as non-fiction, is the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in. John Berger, that most wonderful writer, once wrote: Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one. There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing. So, when I tell a story, I tell it not as an ideologue who wants to pit one absolutist ideology against another, but as a storyteller who wants to share her way of seeing. Though it might appear otherwise, my writing is not really about nations and histories, it's about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of power. I believe that the accumulation of vast unfettered power by a state or a country, a corporation or an institution - or even an individual, a spouse, friend or sibling - regardless of ideology, results in excesses such as the ones I will recount here.

Brilliant, nuanced speech. Utterly fantastic.

You can feel the wellspring of people rising to their feet after Howard Zinn's introduction. Beautifully written. Beautifully spoken. Beautifully ass-kicking.

shaped my politics a great deal then and probably more than i give it credit for now

My eyes feel much wider and my heart hurts more, yet my mind—sheltered as it has been for so long—is filled with hope to encounter such another mind as Arundhati Roy's. I read The God of Small Things for a British Literature class in my early college years and remember being impacted by it. Yet there is so much to it that I did not understand then and am only beginning to understand now. I found this piece among the other CDs at a secondhand store just a few weeks ago. This lecture, Come September, is a short appendix to The God of Small Things in many ways. It's a history lesson. It's a call to arms. And to lay down your arms. It's clarion. And complicated. And dangerous. Twenty years later, it's still dangerous. I think everyone should hear it.

Don't waste your money, this author can't write.

I listened to this essay and it is a wonderfully constructed piece of prose that captures so many world tragedies that happen around September in all corners of the world. Roy emphasizes the arrogance of Americans who only know of our September tragedy and them impact on our world and our reaction and our ego/ethno-centric views. She ends by saying that the American way of living is unsustainable because it does not acknowledge the rest of the world. It is a breathtaking essay which once again I should not have done in an audio book because it is too much to absorb in a 1 hour speech!