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Enchanting tales
Reviewed by Aradhika
Sharma
One Amazing Thing
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books.
Pages 224. Rs 450.
DO
you remember Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Geoffrey Chaucer
describes a motley group of people going on a pilgrimage from
Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury
Cathedral. On their way, share stories and tales that forms book that
is now a classic.
From
Kohlapuris to ear piercing
Reviewed by Rajbir Deswal
Right Fit Wrong Shoe
By Varsha Dixit.
Rupa.
Pages 234. Rs 95.
INDIAN
Kohlapuris are not permitted in the West-influenced corporate offices
in India, while ear piercing may be. This sums up the mood of the
book, which otherwise has no story line but a narrative sequence that
has no highs and lows but a free-flowing continuum, which is no doubt
interesting to get along. More than storytelling, gossip-selling seems
to be the author Varsha Dixit’s tool here. Undoubtedly, she
impresses though.
Indian
reality
Reviewed by Charu Soni
Lanterns on their Horns
By Radhika Jha.
HarperCollins.
Pages 471. Rs 399.
WHAT
do you do with a novel filled with a cast of rural and urban
caricatures peppered with banal observations that are paraded as
insight into the "transformation in the heart and body of
India"? You set it aside and quickly reach out for a daily
newspaper.
The
lost cause of Eelam
Reviewed by D. S. Cheema
Lost Victory: The Rise and
Fall of LTTE Supremo V. Prabhakaran
By Maj Gen (retd) Raj Mehta.
Pentagon Security International, New Delhi.
Pages 431. Rs 995.
FOR
a moment, one may mistake Lost Victory as a biography of
Prabhakaran. However, the book is more than that, for it takes a deep,
incisive look at the over 30-year-old Sri Lanka conflict and the man
who was considered one of the most effective guerrilla leaders in
modern warfare, the man who lived and died for a cause, in this case,
his dream of creating a separate Tamil homeland.
SHORT TAKES
Searching for the essence
Reviewed by Randeep Wadehra
The Missing Rose
by Serdar Ozkan
Wisdom Tree.
Pages 192. Rs 245.
The Mahabharata
(Vol. 1) translated by Bibek Debroy.
Penguin.
Pages xxxviii+495. Rs 550.
Social Transformation of an
Island Nation
By Rani Mehta & S. R. Mehta.
Kalpaz.
Pages 256. Rs 690.
Rising above rivalry
Lalit Mohan
Our founding fathers were men of uncommon decency, as revealed
in a collection of old letters published by Nehru
THERE
is something about a struggle for freedom that brings out the best in
men and produces some of the titans of history. But it is also a fact
that these men are, after all, human and the clouds of euphoria that
surround such strivings often hide some of their baser and meaner
qualities that are common knowledge to their close contemporaries.
Tête-à-tête
Art through
the lens
Nonika Singh
HIS
presence as the chairperson of the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi might
make one forget who Diwan Manna really is. As he goes about extolling
the qualities of invited artists at the akademi’s hugely successful
and exceptionally well-organised functions, only too happy to let
others bask in the limelight, one is likely to overlook the eminence
of Chandigarh’s very own artist.
Pearson
plans social network
Nick Clark
THe
publisher Pearson is preparing to launch its own social network to
capitalise on the success of a website designed to encourage reading
among teenagers.
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