Readable biography of a political doyen
Reviewed by M Rajiv Lochan
Kamaraj: The Life and Times of K Kamaraj
by Bala Jeyaraman.
Rainlight, Rupa. Rs 295
The latest biography of K Kamaraj, very readable, helps us easily grasp the nitty-gritty details of the making of one of the shrewdest public figures in twentieth-century India. This would go a long way in ensuring that we remember how our nation was moulded in its early years.

…And then a poem is born
Reviewed by B. L. Chakoo
Beyond The Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry
by Fiona Sampson.
London: Chatto & Windus. Pages 309. £16.99.
Given that poetry has been written in every culture and era, and therefore in many widely differentiated ways, not to mention languages, this kind of belief that there’s only one way of writing is clear folly. However, it is folly encouraged by the fantasy that poetry always proceeds by movements. This old-fashioned concept is a legacy of modernism. Wedded to the early twentieth-century idea of an avant garde, it suggests that we can only read literary practice as a chronological series of unified movements, each occupying the entire poetic foreground and sweeping away whatever came before. True enough, poetry is written in its own contemporary context.

For Weightwatchers

Varied vignettes of life
Reviewed by Roopinder Singh
Of Cabbages and Kings
by Harish Dhillon
Hay House.
Pages 243. Rs 299.
The sheer ordinariness of life, which most of us have to live, is enlivened by some events that provide the silver lining to the dreary clouds of routine which becomes our life. It could be an encounter with someone, the sight of something, triggering off an association that brings a smile on the face... anything that lifts our spirits.

Flight for survival
Reviewed by Arbina Rashid
The Hundred Names of Darkness
by Nilanjana Roy
Aleph. Pages 313. Rs 495
The unsure meep has turned into a confident meow. Mara, the abandoned kitten blessed with an extraordinary "sending" power, has come a long way from being a helpless baby trying hard to get a grip on her communicative whiskers to a young queen who dares to venture out of her adopted home and claim her clan, an eclectic bunch of cats, popularly known as the Nizamuddin clan.

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