King, Saint and Oprah
Priyanka Singh
Martin Luther King, Jr: A Biography
by Roger Bruns. Jaico. Pages 157. Rs 295.
MARTIN Luther King was a preacher who was destined to lead the mammoth civil rights movement for equal rights to Black that changed the course of American history. In his famous "I have a dream" speech at Lincoln Memorial, he said he would not rest until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 at the age of 35, making him the youngest recipient in the history of the Nobel Prize.

Mother Teresa: A Biography
by Meg Greene. Jaico. Pages 152. Rs 295.
Oprah Winfrey: A Biography
by Helen S. Garson. Jaico. Pages 174. Rs 295.

Pragmatic Mahatma
Kavita Soni-Sharma
Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony
by Anthony J. Parel. Cambridge University Press. Pages 226. Price not stated.
UNDERSTANDING the universe to be an organic whole, Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy exists on several planes—the spiritual or religious, moral, political, economic, social, individual and collective. The spiritual or religious element, and God, is at its core. Human nature is regarded as fundamentally virtuous. All individuals are believed to be capable of high moral development and of reform. It is rooted in ancient Indian culture and harnesses eternal and universal principles.

Legacy that goes beyond blood ties
Amarinder Sandhu
The Other Face of the Moon
by Asha Miro. Jaico. Pages 243. Rs 295.
This book is an autobiographical account of the writer. It examines the story of Miro who was adopted at the age of seven by a family from Barcelona, Spain. The writer spent the early years of her life in an orphanage in Bombay and she came back to India "to try to address a long series of questions". Miro was adopted along with her sister Fatima.

Towards a better tomorrow
Aditi Garg
Job Creation and Poverty Reduction in India: Towards Rapid and Sustained Growth
Ed. Sadiq Ahmed. Sage Publications. Pages 350. £37.50.
The money makes the world go round, and there are umpteen numbers of forces at work that make the money go round. Managing and juggling these interrelated aspects and fine-tuning them to get a country at par or above the other economies of the world is a great responsibility for any government. If the government ascertains that everyone is capable enough by way of ensuring education and infrastructure, unemployment could be greatly curbed.

Kids robbed of their innocence
JACQUELINE Wilson’s children’s books feature five-year-olds being physically abused, 14-year-olds having affairs with their teachers, and mothers leaving their babies in dustbins. So when the former children’s laureate claims our children "act like adults at an alarmingly early age", resurrecting the debate that they are being robbed of their childhoods, she does so with a degree of authority.

Lesson in leadership
David Goldblatt
Gang Leader For A Day
by Sudhir Venkatesh. Allen Lane, £18.99.
A professor’s crash course in the crack trade has few parallels in social science
The publisher of Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day is trying to flog it by its association with Freakonomics (Venkatesh contributed to Steven Levitt’s bestseller), but 20 years from now, the order of precedence will have been reversed. Venkatesh has written a work whose intellectual depth and immense humanity have few parallels in social science.

Mission to unravel myths
Madhushree Chatterji
A cat has nine lives. Or may be not. A cat can survive death plunges from 32-storey buildings because of variations in speed, heartbeats and energy loss that act as cushions while falling, explains visiting Australian scientist Karl Kruszelnicki.

Hooked to Harry Potter
The magic spell cast by Harry Potter on its young as well as old fans is similar to the addiction that drugs or cigarettes inflict on people, according to a leading psychologist. Jeffrey Rudski has claimed that many of the boy wizard’s readers are suffering from withdrawal in just the way that drug addicts do.

Rushdie on the life and times of Jodha
Emperor Akbar’s wife Jodhabai was merely a figment of imagination, if one were to go by Salman Rushdie’s latest short story that has come at a time when a section of the Rajput community is protesting a Bollywood film on the royal couple for allegedly distorting facts.

SHORT TAKES
Novella and a blast from the past
Randeep Wadehra
Dance
by M. Mukundan (Translated by D. Krishna Ayyar & KG Ramakrishnan)
Katha. Pages 123. Rs 175
This slim novelette has a rather large canvas that spans Kerala, Europe and America. The protagonist, Agni alias Balakrishna, is a youthful exponent of kalaripayattu – Kerala’s martial art form wherein, like in our classical dance forms, one has to be mentally focused, physically agile and spiritually aware in order to generate heightened experience for the performer and the aficionados alike.

Shakespeare’s Daughter & Other Plays
by CD Sidhu. Writers Workshop. Pages 422. Rs 200 (flexiback)
The Alipore Bomb Case
by Noorul Hoda (Ed Shyam Banerji). Niyogi Books. Pages 176. Rs 395

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