The siege of Mariupol from within, humanity subject to the rain, the biography of Gabriela Mistral and other books of the week

According to a UN report, the absence of water has killed 650,000 people in the last fifty years and is estimated to have caused seven hundred million displacements in 2023. That is why the book is so relevant. Thirst, by Virginia Mendoza, a pleasant essay that x-rays life in those places where humanity becomes subject to the rain. In her book, the author connects her grandfather's skills in locating springs in La Mancha with the inhabitants of other dry places who also look at the sky with anguish, or who are forced to emigrate: the homeland is where it's raining.

Andrea Nicastro, journalist Corriere della Sera, has worked as an envoy in conflicts such as Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and now, Ukraine. And he was one of the few journalists who experienced from within the siege of the city of Mariupol by the Russian army. Our correspondent Cristian Segura reviews Nicastro's book The siege of Mariupol, a wonderful fiction with very real characters that tells the multiple aspects of the people who live and suffer the war.

In the world, and it has always been like this, although now more thanks to the loudspeaker of social networks, the one who shouts the loudest monopolizes the power and attention. Faced with this, the most timidly furious representatives of a silent majority once again quietly protest to demand a calmer, less irritated world. The British writer and activist Hamja Ahsan compiles in Shy radicals different documents about the radical introverted world, a political current that fights unnoticed against verbiage and impudence. In this parody, we find interviews with the political prisoners of the movement, pamphlets that raise funds and even the Constitution of the Shy People's Republic of Aspergistan.

Other books reviewed by experts Babelia are Mistral, a lifethe first volume of Elizabeth Horan's biography of the Chilean poet; Watermarked paperthe first volume of the great “delta-novel” that Goran Petrović, who died last week, projected for years as a set of linked texts without an established reading order; At two it will be threethe latest title by Sergi Pàmies; Before oblivion comesAna Rodríguez Fischer's fiction about the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva; Petrarch. Poet, thinker, character, by Francisco Rico, which culminates his commented chronology of the very eventful life of the poet and scholar of Greco-Latin antiquities; and The sense of consent, by Clara Serra, highly recommended reading in times of #MeToo.

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