Review by Usha RamanTranslated from Spanish by Edith GrossmanPublished by Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin, 1997, 304 pages. Original version published in 1996. Okay, this book sat on my bedside table for over a month, waiting to be finished. I finally speed-read it. Not what I would usually do, but this is not the kind …
Continue reading News of a Kidnapping: Gabriel García Márquez
Published by Thorndike Press / Penguin Random House, 2012, 315 pages. This is an amazing book about a woman’s journey to heal herself. Cheryl Strayed’s world collapses when she loses her beloved mother to cancer. Her marriage to a man she loves breaks up. And without her mother to hold them together, her family drifts …
Continue reading Wild—From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail: Cheryl Strayed
Review by Abbas HassanPublished by Penguin, 2011, 527 pages This is a very readable and sweeping account of Charles Dickens' life. What I found striking about the book was that it presented a very lucid, chatty narrative with trivia about all the books he wrote, the friends he kept (and did not), his habits, his …
Published by Metropolitan Books, 2001, 224 pages. The America of mimimum wage workers is not one that gets a lot of attention in the media. To quote Polly Toynbee’s introduction to this book, it is “a secret continent”. “The barely reported truth about the American dream is that it exists in a country of widespread, …
Continue reading Nickle and Dimed—Undercover in Low-Wage USA: Barbara Ehrenreich
This is a useful excerpt from the article you can access via the link below. New ground is better than common ground: not “I haven’t read that yet—let’s discuss something else” but rather “I may never read that, so tell me about it, it sounds interesting.” http://quarterlyconversation.com/we-have-never-been-well-read-franco-morettis-pact-with-the-devil Having now read Andrew Seal's (high-brow and apt to …
Continue reading We Have Never Been Well-Read: Franco Moretti’s Pact with the Devil
By Usha Raman This is not a review but a statement of purpose. I'm sure most of you will know the feeling.... I am reading four different books. One is on the table next to my bed. This is News of a kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I'm about 10 pages into the book. A …
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