Sunday, February 23, 2003		Books

Memoirs that may ruffle feathers
P. P. S. Gill
Operation Black Thunder: An Eyewitness Account of Terrorism in Punjab
by Sarab Jit Singh Sage Publications. Pages 356. Price 295.
PUNJAB stands permanently scarred by a movement that had aimed at the creation of "Khalistan." Over the past decade, several accounts of what happened or why it happened or who started it all and how it ended have been interpreted and analysed in a variety of ways. And yet the "true story" is incomplete, as yet unsaid and untold.

Terrorising the neighbourhood
Shelley Walia
Review of What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky. Tucson, Arizona. Odonian Press. $8.50. Pages 111
IF anyone hopes to find any favourable views on American foreign affairs and its involvement in human rights issues, he will not find them in this book. Some do take America as the defender of democracy, but this book will show how her blatant involvement in international politics is incredibly brutal and neo-fascist.

Gurbani interpretation you can rely on
Satinder Singh
Guru Granth Vishavkosh (two volumes)
by Rattan Singh Jaggi. Punjabi University, Patiala. Pages 492+510. Rs 500+500.
DR Rattan Singh Jaggi, a former Professor and Head of the Department of Literary Studies, Punjabi University, Patiala, is a scholar considered to be an authority both on Guru Granth Sahib as well as the Dasam Granth.

Enthralling ideas of a towering intellectual
M. L. Raina
The Power of Ideas
by Isaiah Berlin. Edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford. Pages: xv+240. $16.95 (paperback)
WHEN Isaiah Berlin died in 1997, Noel Annan declared his work to be ‘the truest and the most moving of all interpretations of life’ that his generation had made. Soon afterwards Christopher Hitchens blew the gaff on Berlin’s personal foibles as he skewered Michael Ignatief’s biography of the man.

Resuscitating Rex Warner’s genius
Arun Gaur
Fiercer Than Tigers: the life & works of Rex Warner
by Stephen E. Tabachnick. Michigan State University Press. Pages 522.
WHEN for Rex Warner’s 60th birthday (March 9, 1965) Cecil-Day Lewis penned a poem, Rex could not resist making a half-wry, half-witty remark: "You showed an unusual sense of restraint in not bringing communism, fascism or lechery." Indeed one subtle, if not openly professed, aim of the present study is to help Rex in wriggling out of that Marxist-fascist syndrome.

A bare-all story of a showman’s life
Deepika Gurdev
Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography
revised & updated by Richard Branson. Virgin Books. 2002. Pages 608. $15 (Singapore)
RICHARD Branson has it all, he’s hip, fun, adventurous and very, very rich. In Losing My Virginity, Branson recounts his career, from his early days releasing Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells to his life with British Air. It is little wonder then that this captivating autobiography of an icon has been top of the charts and has been rated as the number one international bestseller.

Indian philosophy in one palatable gulp
Vijay Tankha
Classical Indian Philosophy
by J.N. Mohanty. Oxford. Pages 180. Rs 425.
AT last, a modern Indian philosopher straddling both the Western and Indian philosophical traditions has written an introduction to Indian philosophy. This is a long overdue book and we owe a debt to Bina Gupta for having badgered J. N. Mohanty to write it. The result is a work that is informed as well as informative, explicative as well as critical, clearly written as well as philosophically rigorous. Mohanty reviews the principal concerns of ancient and medieval Indian philosophy without either apology or adulation.

Love in lands linked by destiny
Vinita Gardner
Beyond all heavens
by Jayabrato Chatterjee. Harper Collins and The India Today Group. Rs 295. Pages 385
JAYABRATO Chatterjee spins "a spellbinding saga about the enormous pain of grief and the tender violence of love" in Beyond All Heavens. Woven on the loom of imagination, with the multihued skeins of powerful passion, poignantly delineated cultural nuances, literary finesse and sensitivity, it tugs at the heartstrings and floods the mind with a compelling beauty that draws the reader ever so gently into the very heart of the tale.

Meet the author
“Press should give more space to humourous writing”
BHAICHAND Patel is quite a familiar name to the readers of offbeat columns. His lively and lucid style of writing clearly sets him apart and it is no wonder that Har Anand Publications is coming out with a collection of some of his best columns written over a span of almost four decades.

Short takes
“Lion of Punjab’s” impressive roar
Jaswant Singh
Ranjit Singh: The Lion of the Punjab
by W. G. Osborne; Rupa, New Delhi. Pages 97. Rs 95.
AT the very outset the author makes it clear that this account of a few weeks spent in the company of the Maharaja was not intended for publication and that he had agreed to publish it with great diffidence. However, the book provides a vivid description of the splendour of the Lahore court, the Maharaja’s generals and ministers, and his well-trained and disciplined army.