A remarkable feat of journalism.
Illuminating biographies of Indians who retain ancient devotional traditions despite rapid economic change.
In a conscious reversal of the first-person method he employed in his book on Middle Eastern monks, From the Holy Mountain (1998), British journalist Dalrymple (The Last Mughal, 2006, etc.) allows these selected voices to speak for themselves—a tricky task, he writes, since the “interviews for this book took place in eight different languages.” His subjects hail from diverse backgrounds. A Jainist nun lives an ascetic life in the southern pilgrimage site of Stravanabelagola. She left her family, gave away her possessions, walks everywhere so that she won’t harm a living creature and now looks forward to the ultimate path toward Nirvana in sallekhana, or starving herself to death. “There is no distress or cruelty,” she says calmly. “As nuns our lives are peaceful, and giving up the body should also be peaceful.” A Tibetan Buddhist monk who lived through the persecution of the monasteries by the Chinese in the 1950s recounts his newfound attempt to achieve atonement for the violence he committed then in the name of preserving his faith. A prostitute in Saundatti, one of the legions of women consecrated in their youth by impoverished families to the service of the goddess Yellamma, describes her ghastly lot of entrenched illiteracy and almost-certain contraction of AIDS. An aged singer of 600-year-old epics performs his craft in Pabusar over five nights of dusk-to-dawn performances that function both as entertainment and devotional rite. A famous Sufi fakir at the Sehwan shrine in southern Pakistan dances a perilous line between Islam and Hinduism. Throughout the book, Dalrymple showcases his knowledge of the breadth of India and his fearless willingness to penetrate its sometimes unsavory nooks and crannies, rendering this a truly heartfelt work for readers craving a deeper connection to India and its rich spiritual heritage.
A remarkable feat of journalism.Pub Date: June 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27282-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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