India a General Survey

It is good to see that at long last imaginative books are being written on otherwise dull subjects. As the name suggests, Kuriyan’s book is indeed a very good general survey of India. The purpose of this little book is to provide, in a consolidated manner, a comprehensive picture of India…


Reviewed by: T.C.A. Raghavan
Orient Longman

Autobiographies by Indians have one unique quality—their pedestrianism. An exception was Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography and now we have another, Chari’s.Starting from his schooldays in Secunderabad to the peak of his career as a senior advocate in the Supreme Court he describes his life in a racy style…


Reviewed by: Ravi Acharya
Dhoomil

With the untimely death of Dhoomil in February 1975, modern Hindi literature lost one of its most promising young poets. In spite of his relatively small output, (his only published work is a collection of some 25 poems Sansad se Sadak Tak after which he published a few more poems in various Hindi magazines).


Reviewed by: Mrinal Pande
Elaine Morgan

‘She was there all along, contributing half the genes to each succeeding generation. Most of the books forget about her for most of the time. They drag her on stage rather suddenly for the obligatory chapter on Sex and Reproduction, and then say: ‘All right, love, you can go now,’ while they get on with the real meaty stuff about the Mighty Hunter…


Reviewed by: Devaki Jain
K Swaminathan

It is not often that we come across a noble theme explained by a worthy writer in a lucid manner. This book definitely belongs to this rare category. It is most appropriate that the National Book Trust should have asked Professor Swaminathan with his life-long devotion to the Maharshi to write this book on Ramana…


Reviewed by: K. Venkatraman
Frits Staal

Many of us have on occasion been dubious about the obsession in some circles to explain Indian culture entirely in terms of mysticism. This analysis by Staal of how to approach the study of mysticism is most valuable in that it not only puts the matter into a new perspective…


Reviewed by: Romila Thapar
Dan Mole

Barring a few general works dealing with the under-developed countries, the economic surveys by the United Nations commissions and old administrative reports by the erstwhile colonial governments…


Reviewed by: G.N. Rao
Chaim Herzog

Wars generate a spate of books on tactical doc­trine. Chaim Herzog’s book adds to the growing literature on the most important war in recent years,­ the Fourth Arab-Israeli war of 1973: the war which commenced on the day of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of mourning and atonement…


Reviewed by: P.R. Chari
Anwar Hussain Syed

In 1963 Maulana Bhashani met Mao in Peking and Mao spoke to him about Pakistan, USA, USSR, and China. China’s relationship with Pakistan was extre­mely fragile at the time, Mao said to Bhashani…


Reviewed by: V.P. Dutt
L. Collins and D. Lapierre

The two authors of this book have over the years developed a type of book-making for themselves. The idea is to pick up some subject of recent history which is full of incident and drama, visit the site, read up as much as you can…


Reviewed by: S. Gopal
Sarvepalli Gopal

Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently…


Reviewed by: K.R. Narayanan