Published by Jonathan Cape / Vintage, 2013, 128 pages. “You put two things together that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.” This book is about coming together and moving apart, of soaring to the sky and slipping into the underworld. It begins with balloonists in the late 19th century, then …
Category: Non-Fiction
An evening (or two, or many) with the Bloomsbury Group: Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar
Published by Bloomsbury, 2015, 368 pages.Review by Usha Raman E M Forster, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and most importantly, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf... a bunch of undeniably privileged, smart social and cultural radicals who gathered over pastries and coffee most evenings in [what is now] Central London to discuss art, …
Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch—Nick Davies
Published by Chatto & Windus / Vintage, 2014, 448 pages. “If you shut up truth and bury it in the ground, it will grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way.” Emile Zola Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. …
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Frantumaglia—A Writer’s Journey: Elena Ferrante
Translated from Italian by Ann GoldsteinPublished by Europa Editions, 2016, 386 pages. Original version published in 2014. How much do you need to know about the writer to be able to enjoy their books? Nothing at all, according to Elena Ferrante, author of the Nepolitan Quartet and other books. She writes under a pseudonym and …
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Old Path White Clouds: The life story of the Buddha—Thich Nhat Hahn
Published by Rider / Parallax Press, 1987, 308 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian In Thich Nhat Hahn’s Old Path White Clouds, subtitled The life story of the Buddha, the first 80 chapters give us an account of the Buddha’s life and work until his death at the age of 80. The 81stchapter (the last) shows the …
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Meena Kumari: Vinod Mehta
Published by HarperCollins India, 2013, 252 pages. For many years, I’ve enjoyed the writing of Vinod Mehta, the editor of the Indian newsmagazine Outlook, so I was looking forward to reading his biography of Meena Kumari, an iconic Indian actress who died in 1972. But the biography was written on a commission soon after her …
Terra Australis: Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia—Matthew Flinders, ed. Tim Flannery
Published by Text Publishing / Non Basic Stock Line, 2000, 312 pages. I first heard of Matthew Flinders in July 2014 when a friend, Heather Wicks, told me that she was going to London for the unveiling of his statue. Flinders was her fourth great-uncle, who had been the first European to sail around Australia. …
Deep South—Four Seasons on Back Roads: Paul Theroux
Published by Eamon Dolan / Mariner Books, 2015, 464 pages. Like Paul Theroux, travellers often go in search of adventure in other countries before exploring their own. Having travelled to remote corners throughout the world, he sets out to discover a part of his own country—the United States—that he knows mostly through its fiction. The …
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The Professor and the Madman : A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary—Simon Winchester
Published by Harper, 1998, 256 pages. Dictionary: A book which explains usually in alphabetic order, the words of a language, giving for each word its typical spelling, an explanation of its meaning or meanings, and often other information, such as pronunciation, etymology, synonyms and illustrative examples. The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the most …
Some histories can never be reconciled
The Underground Railroad published by Doubleday / Random House, 2016, 320 pages.Killers of the Flower Moon published by Random House, 2016, 352 pages.Review by Usha Raman Strange fruit—the title of a song by Billie Holliday that's been playing on my car stereo, and I can't get it out of my mind...nor can I get the images …
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