Monday, November 24, 2008

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies reviewed by UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA


Sea of Poppies is the first of a planned trilogy, and this is a good thing because the novel ends rather dramatically. Despite the sprawling canvas, the pace never slackens for a moment in this most well-crafted of Ghosh’s novels since The Shadow Lines and The Calcutta Chromosome. Even more than a fine plot and rich historical detail, it is the language that carries the novel through more than 500 pages – a spirited, playful, passionate and fiercely, gloriously living language that throbs and thrives with every encounter between people and cultures, a language that turns and moves as naturally as the waters upon which the travellers sail.
.............
 
is the first of a planned trilogy, and this is a good thing because the novel ends rather dramatically. Despite the sprawling canvas, the pace never slackens for a moment in this most well-crafted of Ghosh’s novels since The Shadow Lines and The Calcutta Chromosome. Even more than a fine plot and rich historical detail, it is the language that carries the novel through more than 500 pages – a spirited, playful, passionate and fiercely, gloriously living language that throbs and thrives with every encounter between people and cultures, a language that turns and moves as naturally as the waters upon which the travellers sail.  more

Friedman’s book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded reviewed by SHELLEY WALIA in the Hindu

After his now-famous The World is Flat, which he wrote for the corporate world, Friedman turns to green consciousness hoping that the executive world, which patiently gave its ears to his views on globalisation, will now be ready audience for his anxiety and warning about global warming and the acceleration of the melting of glaciers. It is in view of this urgency that Friedman’s book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, comes as one more addition to the increasing literature on climate change, a bold and decisive step to raise an environmentally conscious public and shake off any complacency.

A sincere diagnosis of the ecological problem facing humanity, Friedman’s book uses opinions of various experts in the field of environment whom he has interviewed or has had serious discussions with. He is, indeed, deeply concerned with the fatal tampering with nature and the reckless misuse of our surroundings and draws the reader’s attention to the contamination of soil, water and air, affecting vegetation, birds and wildlife, and also to those who have the arrogance to refuse to be persuaded.

  more

Friday, November 14, 2008

HIS LITTLE CHURCH WENT TO MARKET - Market Driven, Puurpose Driven Churches

Margaret L. Been  writes:

In the non-fiction line, I’m currently building a resource library on the subject of the contemporary church:  false doctrines, wolves in the flock, New Age undercurrents (mysticism, alternative medicine, yoga, reiki, etc.), and signs of the end times–including the Scriptural importance of and events centering on Israel.
I’ve just found two extremely helpful books:  THIS LITTLE CHURCH WENT TO MARKET: THE CHURCH IN THE AGE OF ENTERTAINMENT, and THIS LITTLE CHURCH STAYED HOME:  A FAITHFUL CHURCH IN DECEPTIVE TIMES–both by Pastor Gary Gilley, published by Evangelical Press.
Along with clearly portraying the market-driven, purpose driven, seeker friendly churches as having abandoned Biblical standards and true Christianity, Pastor Gilley delineates those aspects of our American culture which have given rise to the apostate Purpose Driven and Emergent Church movements. 
Francis Schaeffer style, Pastor Gilley presents a comprehensive analysis of changing world views over past centuries–from Christian, Enlightenment, Modernist, up to the present Post-Modern paradigm along with the cultural changes that have characterized these views.
THIS LITTLE CHURCH WENT TO MARKET AND THIS LITTLE CHURCH STAYED HOME are written in a riveting style which includes occasional bits of wry humor.  They contain historical background and literary references which always add dimension to information.  The books are slim in size, but mighty in content–presenting enough food for thought to warrant many re-readings.  more 

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Stephen Pimpare: A People's History of Poverty in America

Review by Suzanne Niemoth

Capitalism's unequal distribution of wealth and resources necessarily engenders economic "winners" and "losers." But the poor in the United States are often described solely in terms of moral failures: they're lazy, irresponsible and just don't want to work hard for success. Indeed, openly blaming the poor for poverty has been en vogue since Reagan's acidic "welfare queen" remarks. However, in A People's History of Poverty in America, Stephen Pimpare takes a decidedly less accusatory look at the history of poverty in our country. Told from the perspective of the poor themselves, the moving stories of hard work, bad luck, and almost insurmountable institutional inequalities brim with a quiet dignity.

– Suzanne Niemoth


source

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Albert Camus

Albert Camus Biography (1913 - 1960)

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RELATED WORKS
  • Novels
  • 1942 The Outsider
  • 1947 The Plague
  • 1956 The Fall
  • Stories
» More works

(born Nov. 7, 1913, Mondovi, Alg.—died Jan. 4, 1960, near Sens, France) French novelist, essayist, and playwright, best known for such novels as L'Étranger (1942; The Stranger), La Peste (1947; The Plague), and La Chute (1956;The Fall) and for his work in leftist causes. He received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Early years

Less than a year after Camus was born, his father, an impoverished worker of Alsatian origin, was killed in World War I during the First Battle of the Marne. His mother, of Spanish descent, did housework to support her family. Camus and his elder brother Lucien moved with their mother to a working-class district of Algiers, where all three lived, together with the maternal grandmother and a paralyzed uncle, in a two-room apartment. Camus's first published collection of essays, L'Envers et l'endroit (1937; “The Wrong Side and the Right Side”), describes the physical setting of these early years and includes portraits of his mother, grandmother, and uncle. A second collection of essays,Noces (1938; “Nuptials”), contains intensely lyrical meditations on the Algerian countryside and presents natural beauty as a form of wealth that even the very poor can enjoy. Both collections contrast the fragile mortality of human beings with the enduring nature of the physical world.

In 1918 Camus entered primary school and was fortunate enough to be taught by an outstanding teacher, Louis Germain, who helped him to win a scholarship to the Algiers lycée (high school) in 1923. (It was typical of Camus's sense of loyalty that 34 years later his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature was dedicated to Germain.) A period of intellectual awakening followed, accompanied by great enthusiasm for sport, especially football (soccer), swimming, and boxing. In 1930, however, the first of several severe attacks of tuberculosis put an end to his sporting career and interrupted his studies. Camus had to leave the unhealthy apartment that had been his home for 15 years, and, after a short period spent with an uncle, Camus decided to live on his own, supporting himself by a variety of jobs while registered as a philosophy student at the University of Algiers.

At the university, Camus was particularly influenced by one of his teachers, Jean Grenier, who helped him to develop his literary and philosophical ideas and shared his enthusiasm for football. He obtained a diplôme d'études supérieures in 1936 for a thesis on the relationship between Greek and Christian thought in the philosophical writings of Plotinus and St. Augustine. His candidature for the agrégation (a qualification that would have enabled him to take up a university career) was cut short by another attack of tuberculosis. To regain his health he went to a resort in the French Alps—his first visit to Europe—and eventually returned to Algiers via Florence, Pisa, and Genoa.  source

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Rehman Rahi, Kashmiri poet, conferred Jnanpith award

Rehman Rahi, a true poet of Kashmiriyat

 
By Sarwar Kashani,IANS,
Srinagar : He is truly a poet of "Kashmiriyat" who has boldly voiced the pain and agony incurred by the land of peace and love during two decades of violence. That's how fans and friends describe Rehman Rahi, the recipient of this year's - India's highest literary honour.
Rahi was Thursday conferred the award by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a function in the national capital.
For 83-year-old Rahi, the first Kashmiri to be given the honour, it was a joyous moment blended with sorrow.
"The award is not only an honour for my poetry but is also in recognition of language ... the language of our speech and thought," Rahi told IANS.
"I am happy and sad," he said. "Happy, because I was honoured. Sad, because my people continue to be in distress."
The frail looking Rahi, in whose poetry you may find a touch of Nietzsche's philosophy, is aptly regarded as the greatest living Kashmiri poet.
Rahi, the author of more than a dozen books, including the poetic collection "Farmove Zartushtan" - the title Nietzsche used for his seminal work "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" - became the youngest Indian to win the Sahitya Akademi award in 1961. In 1999, he was honoured with the Padmashri.
Rahi began his career as a government clerk and was associated with the Progressive Writers' Association, of which he later became the general secretary. He was a sub-editor with an Urdu daily in Kashmir before he joined the University of Kashmir, from where he retired as a professor in 1983.
"He protected the Kashmiri language from Persian and Urdu influences. With his every written and spoken word, he tries to bring to the fore the essential inclusiveness of Kashmiri culture - the Kashmiriyat," said Bashir Manzar, a poet and an editor of an English daily published from Srinagar.
"Rahi is a poet of Kashmiris - Hindus and Muslims. He is a proud figure for both," Manzar said.
In 1947, then a budding poet, Rahi founded the Kashmiri Cultural Congress - a movement that earned Kashmiri literature a recognition in line with other major languages of the Indian sub-continent.
Rahi has earned credit for giving the Kashmiri language its modern idiom of expression and has been one of the forces behind writing the encyclopaedia of Kashmir.  more 

Church in India: Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity ? by Dr Gezim Alpion


Sunday, November 2, 2008

Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah by Indrajit Hazra




Indrajit Hazra, Hindustan Times
November 01, 2008







Wu Ming’s concept of the UNO - Unidentified Narrative Object

As a man who earns his monthly bread from trying to figure out new ways of saying the same old goddamned things, the concept of the Unidentified Narrative Object has come as a blinding revelation. An Unidentified Narrative Object (UNO) is, in the words of an Italian group of writers calling itself Wu Ming, a blend of non-fiction and fiction used to describe and produce in the reader a giant block of unidentified feelings about a specific subject.
Unlike Truman Capote’s ‘fact+fiction=faction’ and its obsessive hankering for details, the UNO slithers about like a beast, sometimes trodding the path of hard reportage, sometimes flipping over into personal mutterings, sometimes tripping on philosophical ruminations, sometimes diving into novelistic ‘voices’ and sometimes gearing into social theory. And unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘gonzo journalism’, it’s dead serious. The UNO’s only purpose is to get us reacting violently on a subject using all the tricks known in the narrating trade.
The book that led me to the discovery of Wu Ming’s concept of the UNO is the staggeringly graphic Gomorrah by Italian journalist Roberto Saviano. The book burrows deep into the underbelly of the organised crime network of Naples, the Camorra, and tells us in sensual detail how whole towns are destroyed, globe-spanning connections spanning continents affect lives and livelihoods, high-end fashion is stitched to low life, and how in all this, blood flows, not like in the
gangster movies, but banally, like in local car accidents.  more 

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Rowan Williams: DOSTOEVSKY, reviewed by A. N. Wilson

"The book therefore begins where, one suspects, Dostoevsky himself would want a book published in 2008 to begin – if he were still with us and observing contemporary life. The author starts, not with the great Russian literature that is his theme, but with “the current rash of books hostile to religious faith”. “They treat religious belief almost as a solitary aberration in a field of human rationality; a set of groundless beliefs about matters resting on – at best – faulty and weak argumentation”. In contrast to these writers, whose work, it could be said (though the author does not quite say it), was all anticipated in the writings of the later Dostoevsky, Williams spells out the way in which religion actually operates in individual human lives. This was central to Dostoevsky’s work as a novelist. Williams’s book is a work of literary criticism, but it begins, therefore, as if it were one of theological apologetics."