A candid and often moving history of a city’s dramatic past and roiling present.
The son of immigrant parents creates a vivid, affectionate, and gritty portrait of a complex city.
Born in America to Indian scientists who felt “torn between nation and vocation,” Choudhury grew up in New Jersey, taken twice for stays in India. Those experiences planted a seed of yearning, and in 2001, after graduating from Princeton, he went back to Calcutta to work as a reporter at the Statesman. Although he had planned to stay forever, enduring two monsoons changed his mind: he returned home and enrolled in a doctoral program in political science at Yale. Calcutta’s draw was seductive, though, and for his doctoral dissertation, he embarked on a yearlong study of the city. That study informs his literary debut, an insightful melding of family memoir, autobiography, and history that illuminates the politics, society, and culture of “dirty, disorderly, teeming” Calcutta. Until the 1970s, Choudhury writes, Calcutta was India’s largest city, an impressive manufacturing hub in the nation’s wealthiest state. But in the ensuing decades, the city declined drastically: silt piles made its river unnavigable, and unions killed manufacturing, leaving 45,000 acres of rusting factories. Yet what others deem “an urban hellhole” the author sees as a rich palimpsest of cultural memory, “an infinite regression of experiences of longing and loss.” Besides describing Calcutta’s thronging, cacophonous daily life, the author examines the dire consequences of British colonialism. “The lasting legacy of the British in Bengal was famine,” Choudhury reveals. In 1943, 3 million starved to death. The British mandate of partition incited fierce religious wars between Hindus and Muslims, forcing Bengals from their ancestral land. His own family suffered in the upheaval; millions were uprooted, arriving as refugees in Calcutta. Colonial rule left India deeply demoralized, believing itself doomed to “failure upon failure”: “failure to not spit and piss everywhere,” “failure to cover our drains, to provide clean drinking water or clinics or schools or the basics of a dignified life.”
A candid and often moving history of a city’s dramatic past and roiling present.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-156-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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