Subtle, sobering and very smart.
Novelist and New York Review of Books regular Mishra (An End to Suffering, 2004, etc.) blends reportage with travel memoir in a riveting collection of essays about religion, poverty and political jockeying in southern Asia.
Examining the clash between tradition and modernity, the author seeks to understand the seeds and fruits of both Hindu nationalism and radical Islam. Mishra begins his peregrinations in India, where he grew up. Insisting that there’s more to his homeland than intractable tension between Muslims and Hindu nationalists, he zeroes in on the now-sizable middle-class, which wants the same things Americans and Brits want: stability, security and material possessions. By Mishra’s account, even the most ardent Hindu nationalists do not wish, “like the jihadis, to challenge or reject the knowledge and power of the West.” Pakistan, however, seems to him “much further away.” Though he constantly scrutinizes his own prejudices, the author cannot deny that he feels anxious about the Islam that he encounters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Throughout, Mishra slips in lessons for ignorant Westerners, even offering a sympathetic but hardly naïve discussion of Muslim thinker Mohammad Iqbal. And he rejects simplistic analysis: Ruminating on the Taliban’s destruction of giant Buddhist statues, for example, he admits to being silenced by a radical Islamist who asked why Western journalists were so up-in-arms about these statues but didn’t seem to care about the horrible conditions of refugee camps near Peshawar. The book has a few flaws, however. The author pays less attention than he should to gender; women pop up (there are Bollywood starlets, forceful politicians, veiled, anonymous Muslim wives), but only as cameo appearances. Short final chapters on Nepal and Tibet feel tacked on; readers would have had plenty to digest without them.
Subtle, sobering and very smart.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-17321-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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