LitPundit Home of all things literary

About seven years ago, when she was 38, Rosemary Mahoney rowed down the Nile, alone, in a small skiff. ''What I wanted, really, was not just to seethe Nile River,'' she writes, ''but to sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone.'' Whether she was deranged, courageous, or a little of both is a question that hangs over Down the Nile, her riveting account of the experience, a portrait of the artist as an obsessive, sunburned young woman and of the complicated male-dominated society that she encountered in that part of the world.

Review at Entertainment Weekly

Kanjisheik, reviewing William Darlymple's The Last Mughal writes

Using all these disparate sources, Darlymple succeeds in creating a masterpiece that challenges the existing theories about the Revolt. Instead of the single coherent mutiny or patriotic national war of independence beloved of Victorian or Indian nationalist historians, Darlymple says that there was in reality a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance that were determined by local and regional factors.

In another review, noted author Kushwant Singh writes

Dalrymple's book rouses deep emotions. It will bring tears to the eyes of every Dilliwala, among whom I count myself.

Readers interested in the book will also be interested in the piece "Rising, Falling" written by William Dalrymple offering a "a new look at one of Indian history's most enigmatic episodes, and its aftermath"

Poppa Neutrino is a man teeming with ideas and ambitions, a fool to some and a marvel to others, a near-toothless chronic nomad and a transitory gambler, soldier, preacher, prophet, musician, husband, and father, among other things, and especially a raft-builder and sailor whose passions (...)

Alec Wilkinson makes sense of it all in "The Happiest Man in the World " despite writing about someone whose "lavish and prodigal [life] does not easily compress." Wilkinson succeeds in part by skillfully shifting among his roles as a detached narrator, an interpreting presence, and a participating character.

Review at The Boston Globe

Samanth Subramanian has a nice little review of Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary in which he "revisits one book from his youth every month, over the course of the year." I first came across the book in a shop in South Africa while I was 'wasting' time in a bookshop and was struck by the large number of authors and books I have not even heard of, let alone read! Samanth feels the same way

On one level, A Reading Diary profoundly depresses me. There are far, far too many authors whom I haven't read, and probably never will. Who has even heard of Adolfo Bioy Casares or Sei Shonagon or Dino Buzzati or Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis? Where can I find them? Yet these authors are so familiar to Manguel that he is revisiting their works!

Pankaj Mishra has a lengthy review of 's book "The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future" at The New York Review of Books

In a chapter that forms the core of the book, she examines the ideas and legacies of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, founding fathers of India's democracy. Her admiration for Tagore and Gandhi is deep. However, she offers only qualified praise for Nehru, India's resolutely rationalist first prime minister. Nussbaum laments that Nehru neglected "the cultivation of liberal religion and the emotional bases of a respectful pluralistic society"—a failure that she thinks left the opportunity wide open for the BJP's "public culture of exclusion and hate."

...
Nussbaum, who has frequently visited India to research how gender relations shape social justice, is particularly concerned about the situation of women in contemporary India. She sensitively explores the colonial-era laws that, upheld by the Indian constitution, discriminate against Muslim women. She describes how Gujarat, which has had economic growth but has made little progress in education and health care, became a hospitable home to Hindu nationalists. She details, too, tensions within the Indian diaspora, many of whom are Gujarati, whose richest members support the...

Continue reading

George Perkovich, reviewing "The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor" at Washington Post, finds it similar to "going to a concert and discovering that your favorite rock star is having an off night. "

To the extent that Langewiesche establishes a coda, it is that "terrorist attacks can be thwarted . . . but no amount of maneuvering will keep determined nations from developing nuclear arsenals." Post-colonial nations are fed up with the inequality of the nuclear order that makes it okay for the great powers and Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not for anyone else. So, Langewiesche writes, we must accept "the equalities of a maturing world in which many countries have acquired atomic bombs, and some may use them."

Langewiesche is a gifted reporter and writer, not a policy wonk. Yet, a more careful study would challenge his assumption that proliferation is inevitable in nations such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Nor would a more intensive study have repeated dubious assertions about the extent of North Korea's uranium enrichment capabilities, and a hollow claim that India and Pakistan verged on a nuclear exchange in 1998.

The Atomic Bazaar suffers from the...

Continue reading

Harvard Magazine reviews a very unusual sounding book "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes" by Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein

Together they bucked the fashion of Harvard’s philosophy department, which considered existentialism softheaded, and got onto a jag of existential ethics for a time. “We were going around being obnoxious about what was an ‘authentic’ life versus an ‘inauthentic’ life,” says Klein.

..
Nearly half a century later, those epistemological theories, truth tables, and falsifiable propositions have borne fruit in Cathcart and Klein’s new book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (Abrams). Consider it Philosophy 101 as taught by Jackie Mason. A philosophical fallacy like post hoc ergo propter hoc—assigning a causal role to something simply because it preceded something else...

Bookforum has a nice review of Ryszard Kapuscinski's last book "In Travels with Herodotus". Kapuscinski who died in January, was famous for his reporting of wars, coups and revolutions in the developing worlds.

In Travels with Herodotus, Kapuscinski, who died in January, offers a curious account of his beginnings as a journalist and an homage to the ancient-Greek historian whom Cicero dubbed the “father of history.” Not quite an apologia pro vita sua, it is an autobiography by other means.

(...)

There is a certain shapelessness to Travels with Herodotus, which was published in Poland three years ago. It is a loosely structured, meandering book. We catch up with Kapuscinski in Khartoum, where he took in a Louis Armstrong concert, in the Congo, and later in Iran, where he journeyed to Persepolis, an ancient city built by Darius III. Though Kapuscinski has written a partial memoir, he obsessively returns to Herodotus and his chronicles.

Chandra Manning tackles the grey area between the intersection of slavery and war in "What This Cruel War Was Over", which began as her Harvard doctoral dissertation. Reviewing the book, Chuck Leddy writes in The Philadelphia Enquirer

A larger question is why Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves would risk everything fighting to protect slavery. And here is where Manning's study is at its scholarly best. She meticulously explores the differing conceptions of "liberty" and "manhood" on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, concluding that even poor, non-slaveholding Confederate soldiers viewed slavery as essential to their way of life.

(...)

Manning's final words rightfully bemoan "how the United States could in the crucible of war create such vast potential for change and then, in the end, fail to fulfill it." Despite its sometimes academic narrative style, Manning's book makes an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery and the Civil War.>

Edward Luce, author of "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India" reviews Ramachandra Guha's "India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy at Financial Times

One of the many strengths of Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi is the wealth and breadth of its sources. In addition to official archives and private collections, the Indian historian Guha draws frequently upon the perceptions of writers and foreign journalists. Some of them might wish he had refrained.

This is too short a review to do justice to what is a sweeping and compendious book by one of India’s foremost writers. Airport browsers might be deterred by its length. But considering the breadth of subject matter and the deft touch of its author, they should linger over this one. It is, after all, a "modern history of one-sixth of humankind".