Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Displacement—within and across countries—of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is a fact of contemporary life. UN statistics show that nearly 70 million people, or 9% of the world’s population, are displaced at present.

On receiving the two volumes of Eardley Norton: A Biography I, not unnaturally perhaps, wondered what had led Suresh Balakrishnan to embark on this thousand page plus project. Norton today would be barely known outside a small set with knowledge about the history of the legal profession in Chennai. Evidently this erasure of memory is what spurred the author, himself.

The books under review have different stories with a difference, stories of children of the urban poor in their own words. This is a graded series for beginner readers of English.
Muskaan, an organization working with urban deprived children from Denotified Tribes.

Recovering children’s agency is not always a straightforward task, for their participation in social life and enquiry is always-already mediated by adult frameworks and understanding of children. Yet, that children play an important role as social agents, attending.

The time of impersonal recipe books with no introductions or context, is long gone. They have slowly and steadily been almost completely replaced by food memoirs, travelogues with recipes of dishes one ate around the world or history books charting the origin,

This slim volume belies its promise of a ‘first-of-its-kind’ collection ‘of noir and black humour at its best’. The cover image of a bitten apple and its subtitle, ‘Stories on breaking the Ten Commandments’ make explicit the pointlessly aggressive anti-Christian.

The late Sheila Dhar was an art aficionado who was known for her witty portrayal of musicians and music lovers! After many years, Shubha Mudgal’s stories on real-time musicians shows the same flavour. The anecdotal bizarre situational complexities brought forth.

‘The Epic Story of Robert Clive and the Dawn of the British Empire In India’. So says the punch line on the front page of this exhilarating book Fortune’s Soldier by Alex Rutherford which though is to a large extent misleading. The reader would expect to be acquainted.

In this eclectic anthology of stories from the Nayi Kahani or New Stories movement in Hindi literature which started in the late 1950s, acclaimed poet, editor and translator, Girdhar Rathi offers readers the translation of a personally selected array of seventeen short stories.

Every year most people learn of the persons who get the higher positions in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), the Indian Police Service (IPS) and the other top civil services, from the media—the newspapers and television.

‘Words are to be taken seriously.’(Grand Union p. 415)Zadie Smith’s Grand Union, an eclectic collection of short stories, represents the storyteller’s quest for diverse voices, dialects and possibilities. Born in the northwest London borough of Brent in 1975 to a black Jamaican mother and a white English father, Zadie.

The opening line of the new novel by Easterine Kire, A Respectable Woman, resonates with a popular passage of the Bible (Ecclesiastes chapter 3) where the wise King Solomon articulates that there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.

Two houses, both alike in wealth, are the scenes of Annie Zaidi’s newest work, a novel. There is going to be civil strife, for there is already blood in the streets and the air is heavy with grudges that foretell new mutinies to come.

Anisha Shekhar MukherjiAtman: Odissi Nritya Puran is both a poetic history and a dance manual. The basis for the book is the Odiya text in verse composed by Guru Surendra Nath Jena. Encapsulated in this poetry is his knowledge of the Odissi dance form.

In his poem, ‘Brother Fire’, Louis MacNeice addresses the London ‘Blitz’ of 1940 as a brother. Although an enemy, he views fire ‘expressing even its victims’ (James Reeves). The fire in Tom Sastry’s latest collection is also an oppressor but a force that.

In 1912, the rhetoric by Ezra Pound was considered as a predecessor for what was to become the future of poetry: ‘Poetry is not a sort of embroidery, cross-stitch, crochet, for pensioners, nor yet a postprandial soporific for the bourgeoisie. We need the old feud between the artist and the smugger.

Catherine Eban is an American journalist known for her ‘Investigative firepower’. Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom is her second book on the pharmaceutical industry. Eban’s first work Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops.

Issues related to women’s mental health have always occupied centre-stage attention. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The lived realities of women’s existence that highlight their subjugation and distress in a patriarchal order have been.

The book under review is not only a rich ethnographic account of hand paintings from the Cheriyal village in the northeastern part of Telangana, a State in southern India but also an almost complete account of the personal journey of Bose the ethnographer.

Ever since cinema emerged as a dominant source of entertainment in the last century, its influence on the public psyche remains unsurpassed. Over time and across space, it has changed forms and with technological innovations, its range and capacity have hugely expanded.