People in Glass Houses (book review)
The 2020 UN General Assembly has just kicked off, marking a key highlight of the UN@75 year of celebration. This is the perfect time to share my review of Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses , the best book about the United Nations I have ever read. It started with a simple Tweet by writer Petina Gappah and over the summer I read Hazzard’s book based on her essays published in the New Yorker between 1964 and 1967. Yes, you read that right: Hazzard’s book, more a collection of loosely connected short stories than ‘a novel’ as the subtitle claims, is more than 50 years old. But what makes People in Glass Houses such a stellar literary contribution is that the poignant observations she shares through her stories are all but historical. Her observations on the human condition of bureaucratic ordering are timeless. These profound insights that the UN is unchangeable, that it is not a lack of money or the wrong state being in charge of a committee and that the promotion of a bright mi