Florence Knapp
I have a thing for what-if scenarios, and that’s one of the reasons I loved The Names. I remember at least two occasions when they happened in a literary work – the first was a Hardy Boys + Nancy Drew book that asked you to turn to a particular page depending on the option you chose from the possible outcomes, and the second was a Jeffrey Archer short story (One Man’s Meat) which had Rare, Burnt, Overdone, and À Point endings!
(more…)Anna Funder
Stasiland had me hooked on Page 4, when Anna Funder nailed (in the GDR context) my fascination – why I keep reading about (and visiting) Eastern Europe. She calls it horror-romance. “The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.“
After WW 2, when the victorious Allies were divvying up the spoils, Russia began directly controlling the Eastern part of Germany, and in 1949, GDR was established as a satellite state of the USSR. The rhetoric of Communist brotherhood was established, which had liberated East Germans from fascism. The idea was to project GDR as those who were the innocent of Nazism, and that all the Nazis had gone to West Germany! The GDR, in its 40 years of existence tried to create a Socialist German Man, different from Nazi German Man, and from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man.
(more…)Manu S Pillai
The alternative title of Gods, Guns and Missionaries should be Bharat Ek Khoj – the Hindu Nationalism edition. But seriously, the amount of research that seems to have gone into this book is staggering – over 220 pages of this 549 pager consist of Notes.
(more…)Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness is the final collection that Oliver Sacks oversaw, assembled just two weeks before his death in 2015. Ten essays across diverse subjects such as botany, chemistry, evolution, medicine, neuroscience, and even the arts. They are connected by the title – an exploration of how the river of consciousness has moved through evolution, and how it continues to manifest itself in ways beyond what we normally look at.
(more…)Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre
It’s ironical that I picked up Freedom at Midnight thanks to the show, but this is how history needs to be written. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have created a meticulously researched account of the final year of British rule in India – starting with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy of India and ending with the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi.
But it isn’t dry history, it is almost like a cinematic view of the events that led to the partition of India and its independence in 1947. The narrative is gripping, the prose is eloquent, and the descriptions vivid enough to make one actually feel it’s playing out in real time.
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