Sunday, July 6, 2003		Books

Blind love for Bill?
A.J. Philip
Living History
by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Headline, London. Pages 562. Rs 650
A SENIOR colleague teased me for spending all of Rs 650 for a copy of Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs. He thought the book's merit lay in the references she makes to the Monica Lewinsky episode that had nearly finished Bill Clinton's Presidency. Since Associated Press scooped that part of the book and every newspaper carried it even before Time could officially carry excerpts from it, this was not the reason why I bought it. In fact, there is more to Hillary than her marital status.

Off the shelf
History on Red Fort walls
V.N. Datta
THE Mughal Empire had great passion for building palaces, forts and gardens. Shah Jahan was the wealthiest of the Mughal rulers who built whatever he could on a grand scale. Constructing such buildings may denote self-expression, a gratification of enormous personal vanity, and a disposition to bequeath a legacy to posterity as a token of adulation and administration. As a dire necessity, Akbar had to build the town of Fatehpur Sikri as his headquarters.

Bestsellers

Mapping India’s journey on the road to democracy
Ram Varma
India’s 1999 Elections And 20th Century Politics
edited by Paul Wallace & Ramashray Roy. Sage, New Delhi. Pages 443. Rs 850.
INDEPENDENT India’s Constitution promulgated in 1950 gave voting rights to all adult citizens, men and women, literate or illiterate. It was a bold and revolutionary measure. In the West where the present form of democracy grew, suffrage was won in painful stages over centuries. It came in one stroke in India. By all accounts it has awakened the mass of mankind that lay wrapped up in a cocoon of slavery and obscurantist ideas of governance for centuries, oblivious of their individual rights.

“Relationships exist in phases of incompleteness”
NOT too late in the day, at 45, Jalandhar-born Navtej Sarna joins the rank of celebrity first-time Indian English novelists with We Weren’t Lovers Like That. A career diplomat with eventful stints in Moscow, Warsaw, Thimphu, Geneva, Tehran and Washington DC, during which period he also contributed short stories to the BBC World Service, London Magazine and reviews in Times Literary Supplement, Sarna is an instinctive writer, and that is more than reflected in his novel. Excerpts from an interview with Suresh Kohli.

Pilgrimage in time of woman power
Samra Rahman
Moebius Trip
by Giti Thadani. Penguin, New Delhi. Pages 181. Rs 250.
TRAVEL books may range from those of wider general interest like Bill Bryson’s delightful excursions into the English towns and countryside (Notes from a Small Island) to those with a limited appeal, (Colin Garratt’s Around the World in Search of Steam). Giti Thadani’s travelogue is the latter. She sets out to rediscover sites dedicated to female deities. It is both an archeological exploration and a passionate pilgrimage. Such a quest can be quite dispiriting.

Remembering...
Leon Uris: The author of ‘near history’
Randeep Wadehra
EXODUS (1958) made him famous. But he began his life on a none-too-promising note. Marital unhappiness, too, dogged him perennially. Leon Uris was born on August 3, 1924, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Wolf William Uris, was a Polish immigrant and in Uris’ words a failure. His mother, Anna Blumberg Uris, was a first-generation American. He married Betty Beck, a US Marine Sergeant, in 1945. They divorced in 1965.

The memoirs of a Communist
Kanwalpreet
A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist
by Mohit Sen.
Rupa, New Delhi. Pages 524. Rs 395.
"FROM each according to his ability to each according to his needs, "Mohit Sen sends through his work the message across as to what Communists like him have aimed and worked for in their lives. Believing like Lenin in the extinction of all politics, and that the government of men will be replaced by administration of things, the Communists want freedom from the fetters imposed by capitalism on the developing forces of production.

A gripping tale of shadowy events
Parshotam Mehra
On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire
by Peter Hopkirk. Oxford. Pages 431. Rs 325.
WAY back in 1914, almost a hundred years ago, Kaiser William II of Germany realising that his war with the British would cost him dear insofar, as both Russia and France had ganged up against him and vowed to "inflame the entire Muslim world" against Perfidious Albion "this hateful, lying and unscrupulous nation." And rally the people of the derelict Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus, Persia and Afghanistan against John Bull’s far-flung if ramshackle dominion.

A song of life sung in the jungle
Jaswant Kaur
Ghond -The Hunter
by Dhan Gopal Mukerji. Rupa, New Delhi. Pages 179. Rs 95.
FAR from the madding crowd in the foothills of Himalayas there is this village — the village of Mayavati. Isolated, yet so close to one’s imagination of an ideal place. A place where there is no selfishness, insensitivity or dogmatism, where no one dies of hunger, where people lead a rich life without having amassed riches. "I am not afraid to be poor," says a carpenter, "if my hands are strong and my home is free of famine, why should I fret for more riches"?

Write view
Rational arguments against fundamentalism
Gibbon on Christianity
Rupa & Co., New Delhi. Pages: xxvii+190. Rs. 150.
CHRISTIANITY helped reform Europe and many other parts of the world mired in superstition and inhumane pagan practices. It introduced the world to charity, compassion and similar other virtues. However, over a period of time religion itself became the progenitor of intolerance, superstitious social environment and such other evils. Consequently, thinkers and scholars began to take a critical look at the history and practice of Christianity.

• Zero Oil: 151 Snacks (Namkeen)
  by Dr. Bimal Chhajer, M.D. Fusion Books, New Delhi. Pages 208. Rs 150.
  

• Continuum 2003
  Poetry Club of India, New Delhi. Pages 190. Price: by subscription.