Guha offers a full, relaxed portrait of how the “Mahatma” came to be, as he gained his voice as a writer, seeker and leader.
The first in a two-volume biography of Gandhi (1869–1948) by a seasoned Indian scholar distinguishes itself from legions of others by its clarity and many facets.
Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, 2007, etc.) relishes Gandhi’s inconsistencies (“Sometimes he behaved like an unworldly saint, at other times like a consummate politician”) and has evidently delved beyond his collected works for material—e.g., unexplored letters to colleagues, children and even his enemies. Spanning his subject’s early era, the author moves from Gandhi’s rather middling upbringing in the merchant caste of Kathiawar in the western Indian state of Gujarat, the youngest son of a polygamous civil-servant father and a pious, vegetarian mother. He then examines Gandhi’s revelatory law apprenticeship in London, the attempts at establishing himself as a barrister in Bombay, and the discovery of his livelihood and life’s calling defending Indians and Muslims against discriminatory policies in the Transvaal, South Africa. Being a vegetarian law student in London brought the young Gandhi into the eclectic circle of the London Vegetarian Society, influenced by the work of Henry Salt. Gandhi also befriended numerous people of different religions and backgrounds, cultivating the kinds of rich friendships across class, ethnic and gender lines that defined his evolving work as a social reformer. Married as a teenager, he was always aware of having to provide for his family and educate his sons, a duty that spurred him initially to ply his trade as a journeyman lawyer in Durban. Establishing the newspaper Indian Opinion in 1903, he wrote copiously, developing his ideas on diet, moral economy and passive resistance. Upon reading John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi moved the newspaper out to Phoenix, outside of Durban, in the first experiment in utopian self-sufficiency.
Guha offers a full, relaxed portrait of how the “Mahatma” came to be, as he gained his voice as a writer, seeker and leader.Pub Date: April 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53229-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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