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DELHI

Name: DELHI
Author: Sam Miller
ISBN: 978-0-312-61237-5

ADVENTURES IN A MEGACITY

by Sam Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 20, 2010

Miller is a delightful tour guide, capturing this “monstrous, addictive city” as it stumbles toward the future.

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Energetic, idiosyncratic tour of India’s capital city.

Delhi, writes BBC correspondent and full-time Delhi resident Miller, is a sprawling urban area of 15 to 17 million people, both ancient and modern. To know the city is to walk it, and so Miller did. Beginning at centrally located Connaught Place, he proceeded in a spiral that led him through the entire city. Mughal palaces gave way to bloated monuments to imperial British rule. A five-story modern shopping mall led to slum housing built over a sewer. Throughout, mosques, temples and skyscrapers battled for the city skyline. Miller stumbled onto countless misadventures amid the people and out-of-the-way places of Delhi. An enterprising shoeshine man surreptitiously and repeatedly smeared feces on his shoes. The author was chased by man-eating pigs, and he visited, in Delhi’s still wild and forested Ridge area, the Prince and Princess of Oudh, royalty now fallen on hard times. Along Delhi’s great river, the Yamuna—now practically a sewer—he encountered a little-used electric crematorium. He viewed at a museum the pocket watch Gandhi dropped at the moment of his assassination, and viewed it again at another museum. He ate Chicken McCurry at McDonalds. He met a rag picker at a garbage dump whose son studied computers in college. He discovered an obscure but beautiful mosque in a thicket of bushes only to find it demolished a few weeks later, replaced by a squash court. Miller misses little and greets it all with good humor, revealing a city teeming with life and aspirations. Yet, these aspirations, he fears, may cause it to be buried under “a thickening crust of modernity”—Delhi destined to resemble all cities everywhere.

Miller is a delightful tour guide, capturing this “monstrous, addictive city” as it stumbles toward the future.

Pub Date: July 20, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-312-61237-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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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.