101 Books Every Woman Should Read

Posted by sinlung on Nov 9th, 2009

Courtesy: http://www.sinlung.com

 

(Here is a selection of 101 books that everyone (not only women) should read)

With so many books available, it can be difficult to decide which books you want to add to your reading list. This listing of 101 books every woman should read will make that task a bit easier. Browse through these categories, which include classics; children’s literature; books that were made into movies; literature that highlights families, the strength of women, and coming of age; recent literature; books about incredible women and their accomplishments; and important non-fiction books written by women.

Classics

These classic books tell tales of love, strong characters, painful lessons learned, and family. These classics are not to be missed.

1. The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Feeling trapped and unhappy with the way her life has turned out, Edna reaches for a different path and ultimately finds her freedom in a tragic form.
2. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. A story in two parts, the first story is about Franny as she experiences an existential crisis and has a sort of breakdown. The second half is told from her brother, Zooey’s, point of view as he helps her get through her crisis.
3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. Mary Shelly’s classic tale of the desire to control nature and the personal responsibility that comes with such actions is a must-read for everyone.
4. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. A massive book, this one will require some dedication, but is worth reading for the strong characters Rand created and her theory of objectivism played throughout the story.
5. Howards End by E.M. Forester. The sisters in this novel set in early twentieth century England guide the reader through an exploration of class as their relationships evolve.
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The life lessons young Scout learns in this book teach her to see the good in humanity despite the ugliness people can often show.
7. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Atwood explores a world where women are stripped of their rights and forced into lives of slavery based on their skills and abilities, specifically following the story of Offred who has been selected to provide a baby for the infertile Commander and his wife.
8. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. This popular story of true love between man and woman is just one of the heart-stirring tales of fidelity and relationships in this classic.
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Not only is this story a captivating tale of morals and society full of rich characters that has lived on for generations, the fact that Jane Austen was able to publish the book as a woman at the turn of the 19th century is remarkable.
10. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The gorgeous writing for which Woolf is so famous meshes beautifully with the theme of this story about finding and appreciating the beauty in life as the reader follows Mrs. Dalloway through one day of her life as she prepares for a party.
11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Learn about the strength of a woman who can see the goodness of a man others cannot in this beloved tale.
12. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. This story chronicles the life of Chinese farmers Wang Lung and his wife O-lan and their devotion to each other and their family.
13. Middlemarch by George Eliot. This classic book tells the story of a strong woman and an ambitious young doctor who live in a community full of richly-drawn characters.
14. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. This epic of love and fidelity is a classic–don’t depend on the movie to truly know this story.

Children and Young Adult Literature

If you didn’t get a chance to read these as a child, or even if you did, put them on your list of inspirational and touching stories.

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. This timeless tale of sisters who embrace their family despite hard times is a story to be appreciated by all women.
2. Pippi Longstockings by Astrid Lindgren. Pippi is a little girl with a lot of pep. She stretches the truth and makes life seem fun even when faced with rules.
3. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Talk about a leading lady, Dorothy guides this famous troop through Oz, stands up to the Wizard, and gets everyone what they need.
4. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. Where would Wilber be without the love and guidance of the nurturing spider, Charlotte? This classic tale of unconditional love will win your heart.
5. Five Children and It by E. Nesbit. Five children who have recently moved from the city to the country discover a magical sand-fairy who grants their wishes each day. The misunderstanding of the wishes brings even more adventure.
6. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. Friendship and imagination lifts these two children out of their everyday lives, until tragedy strikes. This story is based on a real-life friendship between the author’s son and his friend, Lisa.
7. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This classic tale of adventure has Alice traveling through a topsy-turvy world where nothing is what it seems.
8. Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. The resourcefulness of the young Karana who is stranded on an island is inspirational for girls of all ages.
9. Matilda by Roald Dahl. The spunky, precocious Matilda learns to use her special talents for good as she finds unconditional love with a special teacher in a story that is true to the imaginative writing style of Dahl.
10. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien. A story of both community and technology vs. nature, this tale will surely make a place in your heart long after you’ve finished the book.
11. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingles Wilder. The story of Mrs. Wilder growing up in a time long past in the midst of a family full of love and the joy of life has made this book a classic enjoyed by many.
12. Heidi by Johanna Spyri. Heidi’s sweet nature that wins over her grandfather’s heart will also win yours as you read about this vivacious young girl who creates a family full of love in the Alps.
13. Aunt Maria by Diana Wynne Jones. After the death of their father, Mig and Chris are sent to live with Aunt Maria–but things aren’t what they seem there. Mig is the bold girl who braves the controlling aunt and her cronies and their magical powers.

Books Made into Movies

These books have all been made into movies, but be sure to read the books, too, for a more in-depth perspective that can’t always be portrayed on the big screen.

1. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Even if you want to discount this book because of the time travel aspect, don’t. This book is all about love, life, and making do with what the universe throws your way.
2. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. A young woman overcomes a traumatic childhood and finds love among the three women who take her in and teach her about family.
3. Brick Lane by Monica Ali. A Bangladeshi woman moves to London to marry her husband in an arranged marriage. The story of Nazneen and her struggles to live a domesticated life beyond her control are paralleled with that of her sister, living as a social outcast back home.
4. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje’s lyrical writing develops the characters of the novel and delivers them into an enchanting tale of love, loyalty, and war.
5. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. This book, some might say, has been overshadowed by the popularity of the movie, but don’t miss reading this one to really understand the relationships and adventure of these two friends.
6. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. Enter the secret world of the geisha in pre-WWII Japan in this story that follows Sayuri as she grows up groomed to be a geisha and her life as a woman in a society ruled by men.
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Follow the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver as they try to escape the haunting effects of slavery in this novel loosely based on the story of a real slave.
8. Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. A young woman comes to the house of Dutch painter Vermeer and inadvertently becomes an inspiration for him.
9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Celie learns to overcome her difficult life as a black woman in the south through a magnificent friendship that gives her the gift of inner strength.
10. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, relates her life in colonial Nairobi where she falls in love the the land and the people who live there.
11. The Constant Gardener by John le Carre. The story of Justin investigating his wife, Tessa’s murder and his revelations about their relationship and Tessa as a woman are beautiful and inspiring and are set against the backdrop of intrigue.

Books Featuring Familial Relationships

Parents, siblings, and daughters: these books all offer a look at the interactions that make or break a family.

1. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. A beautiful story of family secrets and quiet love, The Joy Luck Club tells the story of a young woman discovering the woman who was her mother.
2. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Family relationships parallel the political climate of one corner of Africa in this powerful story.
3. Midwives by Chris Bohjalian. Told from the perspectives of both the midwife’s journal and her daughter, this story tells of a family strained by an incident that is far from clear-cut to anyone involved.
4. A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee. Franklin Hata struggles with his past as he attempts to reconcile with his daughter and forge a life more meaningful.
5. The Memorykeeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. A powerful secret creates and destroys families in this story of love conquering all.
6. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. This is a story of family and secrets, and how a sister and brother are affected throughout their lives.
7. Splendor of Silence by Indu Sundaresan. Star-crossed lovers who face cultural differences lead this story about family, politics, and freedom.
8. Away by Jane Urquhart. This lyrical Irish tale begins with a mystical love four generations earlier and finds great-granddaughter Esther searching for answers in her family history.
9. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Tita must follow family tradition and is not allowed to marry her love in this enchanting and delicious story.

Books Celebrating the Strength of Women

While many of the books on this list celebrate the strength of women, these especially highlight how women can persevere through anything.

1. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel by Rebecca Wells. Mothers, daughters, and friends are mixed and mingled in this story of sisterhood among the women in this novel.
2. Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. Loosely based on a real village that isolated itself from the rest of the world during the plague, the heroine of the story loses much to the plague, yet perseveres in her attempt to save others.
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre is an independent woman with principles she stands by–despite living in an unenviable situation.
4. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Battling depression, the protagonist in this story finds a way to fight for her happiness and come through on top.
5. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Hester bears the scorn of society as a result of a love affair, but she carries on and demonstrates a strength and humanity above that of her lover.
6. Chocolat by Joanne Harris. Vianne and her daughter settle in to a small French village where they shake things up with their unconventional ways.
7. Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King. Get to know the female spirits that rule this Native American world and the human women who have a unique strength of their own in this book that will take you on a fun journey.
8. Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen. The amazing Babette, who arrives unexpectedly in a remote village in Denmark, has amazing skills and a secret that, when revealed, shows her fortitude and adaptability.

Current Literature

These books offer some of the more recent offerings from the literary world that women will surely enjoy reading.

1. The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani. This story of a 17th century young woman in Iran who, upon the death of her father, is forced into a new life–and one in which she discovers her autonomy through her skill as a rug maker.
2. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. This beautiful collection of short stories highlights women and their relationships, with each story featuring a woman and her parents, husband, sibling, or lover.
3. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. Fidelity, infidelity, and political intrigue are the major themes of this story that tells the tale of King Henry VIII and the Boleyn family.
4. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Two women of different backgrounds and different generations both learn to find meaning in their lives in this captivating book.
5. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. This tale of a man joins the circus after he discovers his father’s veterinary business is going under is a beautifully written account of the animals and people in the circus–and based on research Gruen did from actual circuses.
6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. This compelling mystery will reel you into the plot, but the characters (one of which is based on the author’s imagining who Pippi Longstocking would be as an adult) will keep you reading to the end.

Books about Finding Oneself

Coming of age is the major theme of these books that show young women struggling to find out who they are as adults.

1. Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. A young girl who never stood out in life suddenly finds a hidden talent, and then stumbles upon a way to enhance that talent. As her family falls apart, she must make a choice that will affect how others perceive her.
2. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. This true story documents Lucy’s battle against a rare form of cancer that leaves her face disfigured from an early age.
3. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. A moving story, Middlesex starts with the family history that leads to the protagonist, Cal, living a life as a hermaphrodite.
4. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende. A young woman leaves her life in Chile to travel to the US in search of her lover and finds herself along the way in this adventurous story.
5. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Despite loneliness and isolation, the characters in this book find a way to find push through.
6. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Offered in vignettes, this tale documents a young woman coming of age in the Latino district in Chicago.

Stories of Real Women

These biographies and autobiographies tell the story of amazing women, from Maya Angelou to Marie Antoinette to Amelia Earhart.

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. This autobiographical story of Angelou’s life as a young girl growing up in a time of segregation.
2. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. Posed as an autobiography of Stein’s lover, Alice Toklas, this book is truly about the life of Stein herself.
3. Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith. Florence Nightingale was a woman who made extraordinary changes for the field of nursing, bringing it from a disreputable job to the honorable one it is today.
4. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. While most people know who Anne Frank is, many have not had the pleasure of reading her journal documenting her family’s time in hiding from the Nazis. Do yourself a favor and read this one.
5. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. Read about the amazing accomplishments Helen Keller made over her lifetime in this truly inspirational book.
6. Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliot J. Gorn. Learn about this powerful woman who organized and agitated for the sake of the American labor movement.
7. Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser. This book helps readers see beyond the public perceptions of Marie Antoinette and learn about the real woman.
8. Personal History by Katharine Graham. From a childhood of privilege, Graham grew into a role of a powerful publisher of the Washington Post, but along the way faced a number of challenges.
9. Amelia: A Life of the Aviation Legend by Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. Find out about who Amelia Earhart really was–not just about her disappearance–in this biography.
10. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe by Laurie Lisle. Learn about this amazing artist and woman who broke all the rules.

Non-Fiction

These non-fiction books have been written by women and provide insight on a range of topics that shouldn’t be missed.

1. Fire in the Lake by Francis Fitzgerald. This interpretation of the Vietnam war is considered one of the best. Fitzgerald was a journalist in Vietnam, and she studied the culture at Yale prior to going there. Her experience and craft combine to make a powerful book.
2. Pilgram at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard wrote about the nature of nature in this classic book.
3. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Learn what Woolf has to say about why women write differently from men.
4. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Carson’s popular book brought environmental justice to the American consciousness.
5. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey. Detailing the establishment of a gorilla research center in Rwanda and fighting for conservation and against poaching are the bulk of this popular book published just two years before her murder in Rwanda.
6. On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. This book lead the way to reduce the fear and silence surrounding death in the medical community and remains an important work today.
7. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. Learn how Gilbert found herself after one year of traveling to attain some of her life goals.
8. Twenty Years at Hull-House,With Autobiographical Notes by Jane Addams. Addams started the first settlement house and worked tirelessly to provide for and educate the poor.
9. The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin writes about writing in this masterful book that demonstrates why she stands as one of the most important writers of the 20th century.
10. Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan. This book by a former New York Times investigative journalist won the Pulitzer Prize for its documentation of the plight of a woman called Sylvia Frumkin who suffered from schizophrenia and went in and out of the mental health system.
11. Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover’s Story of Joy and Anguish by Mark Levin. This touching story is about the love a family can have for a dog, what the dog can bring to that family, and how to say goodbye.
12. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. This true story of a man who has taken on the Taliban by building schools and providing education for girls.

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Filed under: Book of the week , 101 Books Every Woman Should Read

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

by Hilary Mantel

653pp, Fourth Estate, £18.99

(Now on display in your Library Call No. 823 MAN-W)

Read here one review by

Christopher Tayler

Courtesy: The Guardian

 

Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister to Henry VIII who oversaw the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, was widely hated in his lifetime, and he makes a surprising fictional hero now. Geoffrey Elton used to argue that he founded modern government, but later historians have pared back his role, and one recent biographer, Robert Hutchinson, portrayed him as a corrupt proto-Stalinist. He’s a sideshow to Wolsey in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, a villain who hounds Thomas More to his death in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Law and financial administration – his main activities – don’t always ignite writers’ imaginations, and in the pop-Foucauldian worldview of much historical fiction since the 1980s, his bureaucratic innovations would be seen as inherently sinister. Then there’s the portrait of him, after Holbein: a dewlapped man in dark robes with a shrewd, unfriendly face, holding a folded paper like an upturned dagger. He looks, as Hilary Mantel has him say in her new novel, "like a murderer".

Wolf Hall, Mantel persuasively depicts this beefy pen-pusher and backstairs manoeuvrer as one of the most appealing – and, in his own way, enlightened – characters of the period. Taking off from the scant evidence concerning his early life, she imagines a miserable childhood for him as the son of a violent, drunken blacksmith in Putney. Already displaying toughness, intelligence and a gift for languages, he runs away to the continent as a boy of 15 or so (his date of birth isn’t known, and in the novel he doesn’t know it himself). At this point, only 16 pages in, the action cuts to 1527, with Cromwell back in England, "a little over forty years old" and a trusted agent of Cardinal Wolsey. His life-shaping experiences in France, Italy and the Netherlands are dealt with in flashback here and there: he has been a soldier, a trader and an accountant for a Florentine bank; he has killed a man and learned to appreciate Italian painting.

Mantel’s Cromwell is an omnicompetent figure, "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Fluent in many languages, learned, witty and thoughtful, he’s also an intimidating physical presence; Wolsey fondly compares him to "one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes". This makes him an ideal emissary for Wolsey’s project of liquidating some smaller monasteries to fund a school and an Oxford college. But self-advancement isn’t Cromwell’s only motive. He’s disgusted by the waste and superstition he encounters, and takes a materialist view of relics and indulgences. The feudal mindset of Wolsey’s rival grandees seems equally outdated to him: jibes at his lowly origins bounce off his certainty that noble blood and feats of arms now count for less than lines of credit and nicely balanced books.

The first half of the novel, built around Wolsey’s fall from power, details Cromwell’s domestic setup at Austin Friars and introduces the major players in Tudor politics. Without clobbering the reader with the weight of her research, Mantel works up a 16th-century world in which only a joker would call for cherries in April or lettuce in December, and where hearing an unlicensed preacher is an illicit thrill on a par with risking syphilis. The civil wars that brought the Tudors to the throne still make older people shudder, bringing Henry’s obsession with producing a male heir into focus. And the precarious nature of early modern life is brought home by the abrupt deaths of Cromwell’s wife and daughters, carried off by successive epidemics in moving but unsentimentally staged scenes. Cromwell asks if he can bury his elder daughter with a copybook she’s written her name in; "the priest says he has never heard of such a thing".

Grieving, he thinks of Tyndale’s banned English Bible: "now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love." More, he knows, thinks "love" is "a wicked mistranslation. He insists on ‘charity’ . . . He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you." In the second half of the novel – which charts Cromwell’s rise to favour as he clears the way for the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn – More emerges as Cromwell’s opposite number, more a spokesman for another worldview than a practical antagonist. Shabbily dressed, genial, yet punctiliously correct on politically controversial points, this More is a far cry from Bolt’s gentle humanist martyr. He’s made repulsive even more by the self-adoring theatricality behind his modest exterior than by his interest in torturing heretics and contemptuous treatment of his wife. He ends up stage-managing his own destruction out of narcissism and fanaticism, or at best a cold idealism that’s contrasted unfavourably with Cromwell’s reforming worldliness.

For all its structural and thematic importance, however, Cromwell’s conflict with More is only part of a wider battle caused by Henry’s desire to have his first marriage annulled. Much space is given over to court politics, which Mantel manages to make comprehensible without downplaying its considerable complexity. Central figures – the Boleyn sisters, Catherine of Aragon, the young Mary Tudor, the king himself – are brought plausibly to life, as are Cromwell’s wife, Liz Wykys, and Cardinal Wolsey. Determined, controlled but occasionally impulsive, and a talented hater, Mantel’s Anne Boleyn is a more formidable character even than her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, portrayed here as a scheming old warhorse who rattles a bit when he moves on account of all the relics and holy medals concealed about his person.

Making characters of all these people is, of course, a big risk. How do you write about Henry VIII without being camp or breathless or making him do something clunkily non-stereotypical? Mantel attacks the problem from several angles, starting by knowing a lot about the period but not drawing attention to how strenuously she’s imagining it. Meaty dialogue takes precedence over description, and the present-tense narration is so closely tied to the main character that Cromwell is usually called plain "he", even when it causes ambiguities. Above all, Mantel avoids ye olde-style diction, preferring more contemporary phrasing. Small rises in the level of language are frequently used for comic effect, as in: "Well, I tell you, Lady Shelton, if she had had an axe to hand, she would have essayed to cut off my head." The effortless-seeming management of contrasting registers plays a big part in the novel’s success, as does Mantel’s decision to let Cromwell have a sense of humour.

"Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year." If not a man for all seasons, the book’s heroic accountant is surely the man for his season. Mantel keeps too close an eye on facts and emotions to make her story an arch allegory of modern Britain’s origins, but her setting of such unglamorous virtues as financial transparency and legal clarity against the forces of reaction and mystification is interesting and mildly provocative. At the same time, sinister grace notes accompany Cromwell’s triumph. Wolf Hall, the Seymour family seat, is a site of scandal in the novel, a place where men prey on women and the old on the young. It’s also where Jane Seymour first caught Henry’s eye – an event that falls just outside the book’s time scheme, but which serves as a reminder that, whatever their status in 1535, most of the major characters will end up with their heads on the block.

Mantel is a prolific, protean figure who doesn’t fit into many of the established pigeonholes for women writers, and whose output ranges from the French revolution (A Place of Greater Safety) to her own troubled childhood (Giving Up the Ghost). Maybe this book will win one of the prizes that have been withheld so far. A historian might wonder about the extent to which she makes Cromwell a modern rationalist in Renaissance dress; a critic might wonder if the narrator’s awe at the central character doesn’t sometimes make him seem as self-mythologising as his enemies. But Wolf Hall succeeds on its own terms and then some, both as a non-frothy historical novel and as a display of Mantel’s extraordinary talent. Lyrically yet cleanly and tightly written, solidly imagined yet filled with spooky resonances, and very funny at times, it’s not like much else in contemporary British fiction. A sequel is apparently in the works, and it’s not the least of Mantel’s achievements that the reader finishes this 650-page book wanting more.

Courtesy: The Guardian

Filed under: Book of the week , Book review, Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

SMG: A biography of Sunil Manohar Gavaskar

by

Devendra Prabhudesai

(To read the Book, Visit your Library)

On that historic tour of the West Indies in 1971, Sunil Manohar Gavaskar and G.R. Visvanath roomed together in the second half, and SMG being the `junior’ partner had to play second fiddle, doing things such as opening the door if the bell rang at an unearthly hour. GRV would ask room service to bring coffee every morning at 7, and SMG would open the door. But GRV would sleep till 8! When SMG ran out of patience and requested his senior to order coffee at 8 a.m., since that was when he consumed it, his response was: "I like cold coffee!"

This anecdote, and many more, embellish the latest tribute to Gavaskar, in a book penned by Devendra Prabhudesai.

Titled SMG, and published by Rupa, it is comprehensive, well researched, and a fitting salute to a cricketer who earned respect for Indian cricket.

This is Devendra’s third book after The Nice Guy Who Finished First (a biography of Rahul Dravid) and Cricket World Cup (an account of 70 best World Cup matches). Devendra, Manager, Media Relations and Corporate Affairs, BCCI, started work on SMG in April 2006. "You cannot push yourself while working on a book like this. It is a happy coincidence that Gavaskar will be turning 60 later this year. There is no better time than this to remember the individual who initiated the team’s climb to the peak all those years ago."

But why Gavaskar? "He was my childhood hero, and I also had the opportunity to work with him. I felt that it would be good if a comprehensive tribute was paid to the man who made Indian cricket believe in itself, and proved that Indian cricketers could be as good, if not better, than others, consistently."

On the toughest part? "Describing Gavaskar’s best innings was as challenging as it was enjoyable. It was a conscious decision to begin the book with an account of his epic 96 against Pakistan on a Bangalore minefield in 1986-1987, his last Test innings. That knock hasn’t got even half the attention and importance that it deserves.

I have begun with that innings, and shifted to the chronological format thereafter," says Devendra, 33. "I have done my best to showcase Gavaskar in his innumerable `avatars.’ I have dwelt on all that he has done since his retirement as a cricketer in 1987 too. Life was never the same after I first read Gavaskar’s Sunny Days at the age of seven in 1983. He inspired me to not only play cricket, but also write about it. Today, my life has come a full circle!"

No wonder, Gavaskar paid the young Devendra a memorable compliment. "Devendra, there are some things you know about me which I didn’t know myself. Just goes to show how much effort you put in this compilation. Thanks very much for it shows sentiments which are truly appreciated."

The book is almost a history of Indian cricket from 1971, and it features significant happenings of the 1970s and 1980s, on and off the field. Needless to say, SMG is a must read and a worthy addition to your cricket library.

Courtesy: VIJAY LOKPALLY , The Hindu

Filed under: Book of the week , SMG: A biography of Sunil Manohar Gavaskar

The Lost Symbol

by

Dan Brown

The new book from the author of “Da Vinci Code”

The book is on display in the Library from 18th Sept. to 10th Oct. 2009

Read a comment on the book appeared on the New Yorker

 

Read All About It

by

Adam Gopnik

In hard times, we look to the single savior, the knight in shining armor. Or knights: the Beatles, forty years on, have reappeared, walking across the same old London road, to rescue what’s left of the record industry. At the same moment, the publishing industry, still afloat but listing, turns to the less charismatic but crafty eye of the writer Dan Brown to sail it back to safety. Brown’s long occult-mystery novels, featuring the intrepid Dr. Robert Langdon, a tenured Harvard professor of something called symbology—a field unknown to both Harvard and spell-check (try it)—are the welcome if improbable million-and-beyond best-sellers of our time, with the latest episode, “The Lost Symbol,” now upon us. The new book is, as every speed-reading reviewer has noted, the same package as before—the wise if wooden professor, the cagey babe-scientist, the oft-naked assassin, and the ancient conspiracy newly brought to life in familiar tourist destinations, this time in Washington, D.C., rather than Paris, and turning on elusive Masonic mystics, rather than secretive Merovingian dynasts. But what, exactly, is inside the package? What spell does it cast and how does it cast it? Books are not so widely read without a reason. Surely future historians will look to Brown as an index of What We Were Really Thinking, and, turning the dense and loaded pages of his books, they may well ask, This they read for fun?

It’s easy to pastiche Brown’s prose, with its infectious italics (“What the hell is going on?!”) and its action-prodding, single-sentence paragraphs. (“Langdon stared in horror.”) The clichés line up outside the dust jacket and are whisked in pairs to a table down front: “In the heat of the moment, Capitol police officer Nuñez had seen no option but to help the Capitol Architect and Robert Langdon escape. Now, however, back in the basement police headquarters, Nuñez could see the storm clouds gathering fast.” Add Brown’s habit of inventing where no invention is needed—there are no departments of “symbology,” but there are departments of semiotics, where Langdon would fit right in—and you have a surface less commercially calculated than genuinely eccentric.

And well meaning. “The Lost Symbol”—with all its ritual murders and fearsome amputations and “My God!”s around every margin—is an amazingly nice book. The text regularly lurches to a stop, with the generosity of a third-grade teacher on a class museum outing, offering bits of research and history. Much of it is bogus, to be sure—though modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past, it was an Enlightenment club, whose greatest product was “The Magic Flute,” and which was about as sinister, and secretly controlled about as many governments, as the Royal Order of Raccoons in “The Honeymooners.” But Brown is having fun. And the book is full of activities; there’s more to do with a pencil and safety scissors than in any Highlights for Children. At a crucial moment in the story, we even have a magic square, one of those puzzles, beloved of twelve-year-old boys, in which every row and column adds up to the same number. (The mysteries themselves, however, are not very mysterious: if you can’t figure out what the tall, thin, pyramid-capped, Masonic-looking monument in Washington to which this story is strangely tending might be, then you are slower on the uptake than most, though swifter than Langdon.)

The connection to the twelve-year-old boy might be the key. Brown’s writing resembles less the adult best-sellers of the past, which popularized high literary forms—“Gone with the Wind” was a kind of kitsch Tolstoy—than the adventure stories that were once the staple of adolescent literature. Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys were always in the midst of compelling conspiracies; there was always a code that had to be cracked, and ancient Asian priests and ancient Asian cults invading their cozy American worlds.

And that may be the secret of Brown’s appeal: his books are as sweet-tempered as they are secret-minded. Langdon exposes horrible conspiracies, but it turns out that, with the exception of a few homicidal hotheads, who have maybe let the thing run away with them, decent, well-intended guys run even the weirdest cabals. Brown’s repeated point is not that we are mired in ancient conspiracies but that ancient conspiracies anticipate modern opinions. What is “coded” in “The Da Vinci Code” is that the ancient Christians were modern feminists; Jesus was a loving husband who deferred to the wisdom of his wife, Mary Magdalene, the Hillary Clinton of Galilee. When we come to the end of this new book, we discover that what the Masons were really practicing was a neat kind of cognitive science. The old codes of the pyramid are merely the newest discoveries of psychology, a thought that turns the text once again toward italics: “ ‘The Bible, like many ancient texts, is a detailed exposition of the most sophisticated machine ever created. . . the human mind.’ She sighed.”

Conspiracies invoked in a mode essentially cheerful, the occult revealed to be engagingly open-minded: Brown’s secret turns out to be the same as Oprah’s beloved “Secret”—you can have it all. Ancient myth and modern science, weird conspiracies and a job at Harvard—not to mention the affection of the heroine. This is the new conspiratorial normal.

The trouble comes not only when you recall real history but when you look around: the conspiracy theories out there today—the ones about the socialist fascists who are coming to get you at the behest of the alien President—are not cute. The old ones weren’t, either. Real anti-Masonic paranoia was a bad business, intertwined with the ugliest politics in European history. Fear and hatred underlie conspiracy theories; they always have. You can draw them away from reality, but you can’t really drain them of rage. There’s maybe something worrying about so many millions of readers entertaining a paranoia on the page that was, in its time, as crazy as the paranoia in the country today. As that twelve-year-old’s mom used to say, it’s all a lot of fun until somebody cries. ♦

Courtesy: The New Yorker

Filed under: Book of the week , Dan Brown, Lost symbol

Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy

By

Arundhati Roy

Man Booker winning author, Arundhati Roy,  takes a investigating look at the underbelly of the world’s oldest democracy in her new anthology of essays "Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy" which is published this week.

"By democracy, I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: western liberal democracy, and its variants. Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, but it’s better than anything else that’s on offer," Roy said.

The compilation is typically Arundhati Roy – candid, chatty, lucid and probing – more like snapshots from all her earlier non-fiction works since 1999.

With intelligent political insight, she shows how the journey of Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms, flagged off almost around the same time in the early 1990s, is now manifest in dangerous ways.

The book begins with an essay on the state-backed killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, explaining how "progress and genocide" has always been comrade-in-arms. They either take place together or follow each other in a strange cycle of fate.

"Fascism’s firm footprints has appeared in India. Let’s mark the date: Spring 2002. While we can thank the US president and the coalition against terror for creating a congenial international atmosphere for fascism’s ghastly debut, we cannot credit them for the years it has been brewing in our public and private lives… it breezed in after the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998," Roy writes in her essay, "Democracy: Who’s She, When She’s At Home".

The argument makes sense.

In the essay, "How deep shall we dig", a text of the lecture that she delivered at the Aligarh Muslim University in 2004, she uses Kashmir to establish the Indian government’s handling of terrorism along its margins – Jammu and Kashmir and in the seven sister states of the Northeast where the "schism between the real and the virtual world has turned into a place of endless speculation and potential insanity".

Roy brings POTA and allied terrorism-related laws under the scanner and poses a disturbing question – "Successful fascism takes hard work. And so does creating a good investment climate. Do the two work well together?"

"Azadi", another essay that first appeared in The Guardian in August 2008, gathers up a controversy – one that leaves most of us squirming in discomfort.

Roy pleads for an "azad Kashmir" saying "for all these years, the Indian state, known among knowing as a ‘deep state’, has done everything it can – subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit, intimidate, purchase – and simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people".

India needs ‘azadi’ from Kashmir just as much – if not more – than Kashmir needs azadi from India, she writes. Which is well, but the essay fails to address who makes up the Kashmiri people and the holes in history? Can an Azad Kashmir make room for all?

The concluding essay, "Nine is Not Eleven (And November isn’t September) is perhaps the most soul-searching of the lot.

It is a spotlight on th 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks – published in The Guardian in December 2008. The essay, while describing the horrors of the blasts, as beamed across by television channels and the post-mortems that followed the live coverage, makes a pertinent point.

"Dangerous, stupid oversimplification like the police are good/politicians are bad… Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes when people in India were beginning to see that, in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators often exchange roles," she writes, citing Kashmir as an instance.

The collection is thought-provoking, well-researched and worth reading.

But in retrospect, the thin line between reportage, editorial writing, sermonising and the fine art of non-fiction essay writing seems to overlap too frequently in the anthology.

Review courtesy: Indiaserver.com

Filed under: Book of the week , Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy

To sir, with Love

The crowded red double-decker bus inched its way through the snarl of traffic in Aldgate. It was almost as if it was reluctant to get rid of the overload of noisy, earthy charwomen it had collected on its run through the city—- thick-armed, bovine women, huge-breasted, with heavy bodies irrevocably distorted by frequent childbearing, faces pink and slightly damp from their early labours, the warm May morning and their own energy…. The women carried large heavy shopping bags, and in the ripe mixture of odours which accompanied them, the predominant one hinted at a good haul of fish or fishy things. They reminded me somehow of the peasants in a book by Steinbeck: they were of the city, but they dressed like peasants, they looked like peasants, and they talked like peasants.

The Book

Author: E.R. Braithwaite
First Published: 1959
ISBN 0745122086

The book has been published as both a memoir and a novel; I’m uncertain how much has been fictionalized. In any case, author E.R. Braithwaite recounts the story of Ricardo Braithwaite, born in British Guyana. He arrived in England in 1939 to pursue his engineering studies, but soon enlisted in the Royal Air Force. During World War II, he found acceptance from his fellow soldiers and grateful members of the public.

After the war, his situation changes. His formal qualifications land him many job interviews, but prospective employees change their minds when they see that he is Black. He applies for a job teaching in London’s East End, and finds himself taking over a class of troubled teens whose previous instructor quit.

Braithwaite faces many challenges. Students do not respect adult authority, though at least he fares no worse than the others because of his colour. A male student tries to goad him into a fight during Phys Ed. A girl burns a used menstrual product in his classroom’s stove. We quickly understand, of course, that these are not bad children, but poor, often hungry survivors of the Blitz. Braithwaite gradually wins the respect of his charges. He treats them as "adults," after a fashion, and requires they treat each other in class with the formal courtesies that would have been expected in the workplace at that time. While demanding a level of decorum, he addresses social and personal issues along with the established curriculum.

Several incidents bring them closer together: a female student’s problems with her mother and her own crush-cum-subsitute-father-search, a male student’s injury by a bullying teacher. Perhaps most significant is the funeral of a student’s mother. The student is of mixed race, and his female friends, in particular, initially refuse to attend because they fear the local gossip that would follow if they entered a "Negro" household.

The issue of racism does not disappear, but it never dominates the book. Race plays a more significant role in Braithwaite’s relationships with other adults. He must deal with inappropriate comments from the staff asshat. The attitudes of the general public, meanwhile, challenge his nascent relationship with a young female teacher. The adult clashes, he ultimately concludes, are "of no great importance, so long as" their "repercussions did not enter the classrooms. It was the children, not the teachers, who mattered" (137).

Braithwaite can seem self-aggrandizing and self-righteous. While he condemns racism for the dangerous nonsense it is, his own attitudes can be classist and sexist. A devout believer in the best of the British Empire, he enters the East End like a Victorian explorer some dark edge of the map, certain he must tame and convert the savages. This attitude, however, is hardly unusual among teachers. He allows that his own views can be flawed; he recognizes his tendency to judge quickly, especially when angered. Most importantly, he understands that youth need to make the transition into adulthood and personal responsibility, soon and quickly. We can quibble with the expectations his society has for men and women, but his intentions are noble. I found many of his attitudes less patronizing than those implicit in a culture which infantilizes everyone under the age of eighteen.

Less impressive examples of the "inspirational teacher" genre exist, and this book retains its charm, though it has become something of a period piece.

(review)
by Timeshredder

Courtesy: http://www.everything2.com/

 

 

 

The Author

Edward Ricardo Braithwaite

 

Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920 in Georgetown, Guyana) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people.

Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen’s College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate in physics.

After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there.His version of events at the school is contested by a former pupil, in Alfred Gardner’s autobiography An East End Story (Gardner, London 2002).

While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His harrowing experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962).

Braithwaite’s numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, with Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role.

In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite’s books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status ‘Honorary White’ which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (The Bodley Head, Ltd. Great Britain 1975).

Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO; permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana; Guyana’s ambassador to Venezuela; and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer in residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-2006 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.

^{Courtesy: Wikipedia}

Filed under: Book of the week , Edward Ricardo Braithwaite, To Sir, with Love

Shadows across the playing field : 60 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket

by

Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan

As its title suggests, the book is all about cricket between the two neighbouring countries and knowing the two authors, there will be lots of vignettes and well, the odd “cricket is a bridge for peace” comment. Knowing the authors, we can also be sure of some brilliant writing. We are lining it up for review.

Cricket fans of the school is waiting for the book!!!!

 

Read a news item published on “Mid Day” here.

Shashi Tharoor’s romantic cricket journey

By: Clayton Murzello

Minister of State for External Affairs, Dr Shashi Tharoor’s cricketing journey has been a romantic one

DR Shashi Tharoor has not watched a cricket match in Pakistan, yet he has co-authored a book on India-Pakistan cricket. But not even a cynical view of this irony can prevent one from being convinced that the Minister of State for External Affairs is a cricket nut.
He has met the biggest of names during his travels as a diplomat, but his Friday meeting with present and former cricketers at the release function of his book Shadows Across the Playing Field was so memorable that it was quickly posted on Twitter.
During his chat with commentator Harsha Bhogle at the launch on Friday, Tharoor showed that he had a deep love for the willow game, developed in an era of simple dreams and pleasures. Unfortunately, his co-author Shaharyar Khan couldn’t make it to Mumbai; he wouldn’t miss the Ashes for anything.
In February 1967, Tharoor watched Ajit Wadekar flay a formidable Mysore team to score a Ranji Trophy triple-century at the Brabourne Stadium. Wadekar was among the audience on Friday.

Way back then
Tharoor proudly claimed that he wrote about Sachin Tendulkar in the late 1980s in the Club Cricketer magazine in England, after Sunil Gavaskar had talked to him about this young gun who could become a great. Tharoor told a few of us how he wrote that Gavaskar had led very poorly during the home series against David Gower’s Englishmen in 1984-85.
The editor of the magazine he was writing decided to amplify things after Tharoor filed in his "tough but fair" piece. The next issue rolled out with the headline: "OUT! Is Gavaskar the worst captain India’s ever had?" Naturally, it created a sense of apprehension when he came face to face with Gavaskar. After all, he did not write what the headline said. The name of the author just didn’t ring a bell, "it sprang", but Tharoor stressed Gavaskar took it sportingly.
If he admired Gavaskar "the cricketer, the batsman and the man", he regretted the lack of opportunities the talented Surinder Amarnath got. And his view that India would have made an effective one-day team had limited-overs cricket been played in the 1960s, is interesting.

Style and Kunderan
He loved Budhi Kunderan and remembered an incident during the 1964 Test against England in Mumbai. Kunderan followed up a six with a four, and then went for another big hit to be caught by John Price. As the fielder set himself for the catch, Kunderan threw his bat in the air, caught it and then straightaway headed to the pavilion. Some style that! Tharoor remembered it all, including how the England team members were laid low by illness. Hanumant Singh substituted for them and saved some runs near the boundary and was at the receiving end of a ‘traitor’ chant. Later in the series, Hanumant scored a hundred on debut to end Tharoor’s displeasure.

Now, the tough talk
As a minister now, he has to talk tough. When does he think India and Pakistan could resume cricketing ties?
Not until "Pakistan really gives us what we are repeatedly asking for: credible action to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism from which these (November 2008) attacks were launched."
If and when things improve on either side of the border, the cricketing world can be assured that there will be a credible voice to help decide on when to switch to a "let’s play" mode.

Courtesy: http://www.mid-day.com

 

Meet the Author

Filed under: Book of the week , Chricket, Shadows across the playing field : 60 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket, Shaharyar Khan, Shashi Tharoor

Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children written by C. S. Lewis. It is considered a classic of children’s literature and is the author’s best-known work, having sold over 120 million copies in 41 languages. Written by Lewis between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, The Chronicles of Narnia have been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage, and cinema. In addition to numerous traditional Christian themes, the series borrows characters and ideas from Greek and Roman mythology, as well as from traditional British and Irish fairy tales.

The Chronicles of Narnia present the adventures of children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the fictional realm of Narnia, a place where animals talk, magic is common, and good battles evil. Each of the books (with the exception of The Horse and His Boy) features as its protagonists children from our world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are called upon to help the Lion Aslan handle a crisis in the world of Narnia.

he Chronicles of Narnia have been in continuous publication since 1954 and have sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages.^[1][2] Lewis was awarded the 1956 Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, the final book in the Narnia series. The books were written by Lewis between 1949 and 1954 but were written in neither the order they were originally published nor in the chronological order in which they are currently presented.^[3] The original illustrator was Pauline Baynes and her pen and ink drawings are still used in publication today. The seven books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia are presented here in the order in which they were originally published (see reading order below). Completion dates for the novels are English (Northern Hemisphere) seasons.

 

The Seven Books

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

Main article: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, completed in the winter of 1949^[3] and published in 1950, tells the story of four ordinary children: Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie. They discover a wardrobe in Professor Digory Kirke’s house that leads to the magical land of Narnia. The Pevensie children help Aslan save Narnia from the evil White Witch, who has reigned over the kingdom of Narnia for 100 years of perpetual winter.

Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951)

Main article: Prince Caspian

Completed in the autumn of 1949 and published in 1951, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia tells the story of the Pevensie children’s second trip to Narnia. They are drawn back by the power of Susan’s horn, blown by Prince Caspian to summon help in his hour of need. Caspian has fled into the woods to escape his uncle, Miraz, who had usurped the throne. The children set out once again to save Narnia; and aided by other Narnians, and ultimately by Aslan, they return the throne to Caspian, the rightful ruler.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

Main article: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Completed in the winter of 1950 and published in 1952, The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ returns Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, along with their priggish cousin, Eustace Scrubb, to Narnia. Once there, they join Caspian’s voyage to find the seven lords who were banished when Miraz took over the throne. This perilous journey brings them face to face with many wonders and dangers as they sail toward Aslan’s country at the end of the world.

 The Silver Chair (1953)

Main article: The Silver Chair

Completed in the spring of 1951 and published in 1953, The Silver Chair is the first Narnia book without the Pevensie children. Instead, Aslan calls Eustace back to Narnia together with his classmate Jill Pole. There they are given four signs to find Prince Rilian, Caspian’s son, who had been kidnapped ten years earlier. Eustace and Jill, with the help of Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle, face great danger before finding Rilian, held prisoner in an enchantment by a Green Witch.

The Horse and His Boy (1954)

Main article: The Horse and His Boy

Completed in the spring of 1950 and published in 1954, The Horse and His Boy takes place during the reign of the Pevensies in Narnia, an era which begins and ends in the last chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The story is about Bree, a talking horse, and a young boy named Shasta. Both of whom have been held in bondage in Calormen. By chance, they meet each other and plan their return to Narnia and freedom. On their journey they discover that the Calormenes are about to invade Archenland, and they plan to arrive there first to alert the King.

The Magician’s Nephew (1955)

Main article: The Magician’s Nephew

Completed in the winter of 1954 and published in 1955, the prequel The Magician’s Nephew brings the reader back to the very beginning of Narnia where we learn how Aslan created the world and how evil first entered it. Digory Kirke and his friend Polly Plummer stumble into different worlds by experimenting with magic rings made by Digory’s uncle, encounter Jadis (The White Witch), and witness the creation of Narnia. Many long-standing questions about Narnia are answered in the adventure that follows.

The Last Battle (1956)

Main article: The Last Battle

Completed in the spring of 1953 and published in 1956, The Last Battle chronicles the end of the world of Narnia. Jill and Eustace return to save Narnia from Shift, an ape, who tricks Puzzle, a donkey, into impersonating the lion Aslan, precipitating a showdown between the Calormenes and King Tirian.

 

The Narnian universe

Main article: Narnia (world)

Most of The Chronicles of Narnia take place in Lewis’ constructed world of Narnia. The Narnian world itself is posited as one world in a multiverse of countless worlds including our own. Passage between these worlds is possible, though rare, and may be accomplished in various fashions. How visitors to Narnia observe the passage of time while they are away is unpredictable. For example, if one year had passed since one left Narnia, a thousand years or perhaps only a week might have gone by in Narnia. Narnia itself is described as populated by a wide variety of creatures, most of whom would be recognizable to those familiar with European mythologies and British fairy tales.

Inhabitants

Lewis largely populates his stories with two distinct classes of inhabitants: people originating from the reader’s own world and creatures created by the character Aslan and the descendants of these creatures. This is typical of works that involve parallel universes. The majority of characters from the reader’s world serve as the protagonists of the various books, although some are only mentioned in passing. Those inhabitants that Lewis creates through the character Aslan are viewed, either positively or negatively, as diverse. Lewis does not limit himself to a single source; instead he borrows from many sources and adds a few more of his own to the mix.

Geography

The Chronicles of Narnia describes the world in which Narnia exists as one major landmass faced by "the Great Eastern Ocean". This ocean contains the Seven Isles, Galma, Terebinthia, and the Lone Islands which are visited in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. On the main landmass are the countries of Narnia, Archenland, Calormen, and Telmar, as well as a variety of other areas that play a part in the narrative but are not described as countries: The Western Wild, a mountainous place to the west of Narnia, and Wildlands of the North. Lewis also provides glimpses of more fantastic locations that exist in and around the main world of Narnia, including an edge and an underworld.

Notably, Narnian geography is subject to the ravages of geological processes. In Prince Caspian, the children return after an unknown period of time to discover that a river which they had known during The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe had changed course, creating an island at its mouth and deep gorges in its upper reaches.

There are several maps of the Narnian universe available, including what many consider the "official" one, a full-colour version published in 1972 by the books’ illustrator, Pauline Baynes. This is currently out of print, although smaller copies can be found in the most recent HarperCollins 2006 hardcover edition of The Chronicles of Narnia. Two other maps have recently been produced following the popularity of the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One, called the "Rose Map of Narnia", is based loosely on Baynes’ map and has Narnian trivia printed on the reverse. Another map, made in a monochromatic, archaic style reminiscent of Tolkien’s Middle-earth maps, is available in print and in an interactive version on the movie DVD. However, this last depicts only Narnia and does not include the other countries in the Narnian universe.

Cosmology

A recurring plot device in The Chronicles is the interaction between the various worlds that make up the Narnian multiverse. A variety of devices are used to initiate these cross-overs which generally serve to introduce characters to the land of Narnia. The Cosmology of Narnia is not as internally consistent as that of Lewis’ contemporary Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but suffices given the more fairy tale atmosphere of the work. During the course of the series we learn, generally in passing, that the world of Narnia is flat, geocentric, has stars with a different makeup than our own, and that the passage of time does not correspond directly to the passage of time in our world.

History

Lewis takes us through the entire life of the world of Narnia, showing us the process by which it was created, snapshots of life in Narnia as the history of the world unfolds, and how Narnia is ultimately destroyed. Not surprisingly in a children’s series, children, usually from our world, play a prominent role as all of these events unfold. The history of Narnia is generally broken up into the following periods: creation and the period shortly afterwards, the rule of the White Witch, the Golden Age, the invasion and rule of the Telmarines, their subsequent defeat by Caspian X, the rule of King Caspian and his descendants, and the destruction of Narnia. Like many stories, the narrative is not necessarily always presented in chronological order.

 

Author

J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien was a close friend of Lewis and a fellow author and Christian, instrumental in Lewis’s own conversion to Christianity. As members of the Inklings literary group the two often read and critiqued drafts of their work. Nonetheless, Tolkien was not enthusiastic about the Narnia stories, in part due to the eclectic elements of the mythology and their haphazard incorporation, in part because he disapproved of stories involving travel between real and imaginary worlds. Though a Christian himself, Tolkien felt that fantasy should incorporate Christian values without resorting to the obvious allegory Lewis employed.

Text courtesy: Wikipedia

Explore More….

Narnia Portal  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Narnia

official book website: http://books.narnia.com/movielanding.html

Narnia Web.com

The Lion’s Call.com

The Chronicles of Narnia wiki

Filed under: Book of the week , Chronicles of narnia, Narnia, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia, The Horse and His Boy, The Last Battle, The Lion, The Magician's Nephew, The Silver Chair, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Witch and the Wardrobe

GABRIEL GARCíA MÁRQUEZ A Life

GABRIEL GARCíA MÁRQUEZ

A Life

By Gerald Martin

Illustrated. 642 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $37.50.

 

Review

Unravelling the Labyrinthine Life of a Magical Realist

By JANET MASLIN

Published: May 27, 2009 , New York times

Courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com

 

In a January 2006 interview with a Barcelona newspaper, Gabriel García Márquez, whose memory had begun to fail, deflected a question about his past. “You will have to ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin, about that sort of thing,” he said, “only I think he’s waiting for something to happen to me before he finishes.”

Gara-Archive

The author Gabriel García Márquez in the mid-1940s.

GM Family Archive

Mr. Garcia Márquez with Mercedes, his wife, and their sons in the late 1960s in Barcelona.

This otherwise doom-laden remark brought good news to the newly designated “official biographer.” Mr. Martin at that point had devoted 15 years of his own life to chronicling that of Mr. García Márquez, though he spent a total of only a month in that Nobel laureate’s company during his extended research. Until that point Mr. Martin had called this project only a “tolerated biography.” It has turned out to be much, much more.

This intensive, assured, penetratingly analytical book will be the authoritative English-language study of Mr. García Márquez until Mr. Martin can complete an already 2,000-page, 6,000-footnote version “in a few more years, if life is kind.” He compressed that sprawling magnum opus into 545 pages (plus notes and index), a “brief, relatively compact narrative,” so it could be published “while the subject of this work, now a man past 80, is still alive and in a position to read it.” Both author and subject have been treated for lymphoma, Mr. Martin says.

That kind of bluntness runs throughout “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life,” and it is essential to the book’s success. The last thing this literary lion needed was a fawning, accommodating Boswell. Nor did he need a biographer eager to show off his own flair. When writing about Mr. García Márquez, king of the magical realists, Mr. Martin understands that it is best to stick to the facts and skip the fancy footwork.

Could any biographer have been better suited to this gargantuan undertaking? Absolutely not: Mr. Martin is the ideal man for the job. He has already written studies of 20th-century Latin American fiction; translated the work of another Latin American Nobel laureate, Miguel Ángel Asturias; and written about Latin American history. These are essential prerequisites for unraveling the labyrinthine cultural and political aspects of Mr. García Márquez’s peripatetic life. So are Mr. Martin’s demonstrable patience, wide range of knowledge and keen understanding of his subject’s worldwide literary forebears, from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky to Mark Twain.

Mr. Martin confidently calls Mr. García Márquez, Colombia’s best-known storyteller and superstar (“Gabo”), the “Mark Twain of his own land: symbol of the country, definer of a national sense of humor and chronicler of the relation between the provincial realm and the center.” But he is just as comfortable linking Mr. García Márquez to less likely literary figures (Virginia Woolf), historical figures who loomed large in his imagination (Simón Bolívar) and dictators, of whom Mr. García Márquez has known more than his share.

This book has the sophistication to weigh its subject’s affection for Fidel Castro against the changing currents of left-wing governments over 50 years, sharply revealing the personal revisionism that has sustained this novelist’s huge popularity no matter what goes on around him. (Not for nothing has he earned “García Marketing” as one of his nicknames.) The biography can slip readily from the exploits of Bolívar to revolutions in Cuba and France. It can discuss “the most famous punch in the history of Latin America,” an occasion on which Mr. García Márquez addressed the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa as “Brother!” and Mr. Vargas Llosa slugged him in reply. Mr. Vargas Llosa’s wife seems to have played a role in this confrontation.

Mr. Martin’s book also has the heft to deliver penetrating thematic analyses of each García Márquez work, even if literary criticism is not its first concern. “No one writes,” “solitude,” “autumn,” “funeral,” “death foretold,” “labyrinth,” “kidnapping”: these are all words used in García Márquez book titles and, as Mr. Martin asserts, words that imply some challenge to power. In addition to parsing each book and its meaning, Mr. Martin must trace the family stories that figure in the fiction, so that childhood years spent with Mr. García Márquez’s maternal grandparents can be seen as seminal to the fictitious setting (Macondo) and family (Buendía) found in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

The complexity of all this is staggering. So is the magnitude of Mr. Martin’s accomplishment in grappling with it. Consider: this is a book that includes four different family-tree illustrations, three devoted to Mr. García Márquez’s actual relatives (including those by marriage and by illegitimate birth) and one for the Buendías he invented. It travels with its subject from his European days as a hungry (literally) young journalist to his politically formative glimpses behind the Iron Curtain to his celebrity globe-trotting in later years.

From time to time the book hits a brick wall, as when Mr. Martin unearths the painful story of a thwarted love affair in Paris and Mr. García Márquez refuses to talk about it. Dogged biographer that he is, Mr. Martin perseveres, though never in a salacious fashion. He finds the old flame, connects her with events in the García Márquez canon and explores his subject’s ideas about sex and love, about private, public and secret lives. How long has this research been going on? Long enough for Mr. Martin to have a firsthand interview with the mother of a subject who is 82.

Given the global love affair with “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” which have been popular even in countries (like the United States) often reviled by Mr. García Márquez, this biography would be essential reading even if it delivered just the facts. But Mr. Martin is too dedicated for that, though not admiring enough to make excuses for his subject’s transgressions. And he zeroes in on the precise achievements that have meant so much in literary history.

How did the early blueprint for a novel about Mr. García Márquez’s childhood turn into a masterpiece about his memories of childhood? How did he bring the town of Macondo to the world by weaving the world into the town of Macondo? And how did his magical realism become this magical? Such questions are in Mr. García Márquez’s books. The answers are in this one.

The Author:  

Gerald Martin

Filed under: Book of the week , biography, GABRIEL GARCíA MÁRQUEZ a life, Gabriel García Márquez, Gail Martin

A BETTER INDIA; A BETTER WORLD: N. R. Narayana Murthy

 

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd

“When you see world class supermarkets and food chains in our towns, and when our urban youngsters gloat over the choice of toppings on their pizzas, why should 51 per cent of children in the country be undernourished?” asks Infosys mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy in his introduction to “A Better India: A Better World”.

A comparison of this kind, which underlines the glaring disparity in income levels in India of the post-1990s, is commonly made to critique the policies of economic liberalisation and the development priorities accompanying them. Of course, the author often described as the “Information Technology czar” of India is far from being against economic reform.

In fact, in the very first chapter, he talks about being on a train along the border between what was then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, an experience that purged him of “any last vestige of affinity for the Left” and transformed him from “a confused Leftist into a determined compassionate capitalist.”

Growth

With this out of the way, Mr. Murthy affirms and reaffirms his faith in the “virtues of compassionate capitalism” (as opposed to laissez-faire capitalism) in several chapters and highlights the “need for broadbasing these reforms for inclusive growth.” The “only solution to the problem of poverty is the creating of jobs with good disposable incomes,” he says, arguing this is an end that can be achieved by entrepreneurs who convert ideas into jobs and wealth, with the government playing the facilitator.

Lest we mistake this as a treatise on business and profits, he repeatedly explains in the 38 speeches compiled here that the “elite and influential” class should have a strong moral conscience and “relate to the reality that is India” with all its contradictions, show “fairness to the less fortunate” and bring “hope and betterment to the millions of poor, uneducated…”

The economic downturn may have dimmed the enthusiasm of many to freemarketeers. But Mr. Murthy, a beneficiary of the 1991 reforms, has unflagging faith in the fundamentals of this regime. Many of the lectures were delivered before India began to feel the full impact of recession. The solution he offers to a range of problems — from urban infrastructure to healthcare and primary education — generally involves large doses of private participation across sectors.

Aphorisms

Divided into sections such as “Address to students,” “Values,” and “Leadership challenges,” the articles here are essentially a scattered bunch of thoughts. The format — speeches delivered in different contexts — seems to have provided greater room for “inspirational” aphorisms rather than for the building of an argument in a sustained way. Even when he addresses a complex set of questions, the answers sometimes end up being predictable and anticlimactic.

There are citations galore from people as varied as Mahatma Gandhi and Thomas Friedman. Honesty, hard work, discipline and so on are sometimes advanced as final solutions. There is a tone of avuncular advice running through the book. So much so that it might eminently qualify to be a text book for those who champion “corporate social responsibility.”

Courtesy:

S. BAGESHREE

The Hindu

Filed under: Book of the week , A better India, a better world, N R narayanamurthy