BABUR, THE TIGER

This tale of Babur, the Tiger, of Turko-Mongol ancestry, whose empire was the first to extend into India (Hindustan), is not an academic account but a real historical adventure story, enjoyable and informative reading for teen-agers as well as all those interested in this phase of Asian history. We are carried from the ends of the 15th into the 16th Century battle by battle among the nomadic tribes that ruled the day, with Babur and his twenty year struggle to retain possession of Samarkand and to the land of Kabul (the land of Cain)- for the most part in the Tiger's own words, for he was a poet-diarist as well as a warrior leader. Where the thread is broken in these first hand accounts, Mr. Lamb, whose feeling for the times is as though his own, carries us forward by telling of the influence women had on the life of ""the first of the great Moguls"", of his hard won lessons in strategy begun at the age of ten, and of the cultural monuments he left behind. He synthesizes events taking place simultaneously in the western world, giving a rounded view of a sharply contrasting, expanding universe. A dependable popular historian once more gives the reader a sense of participation.