Guha offers a full, relaxed portrait of how the “Mahatma” came to be, as he gained his voice as a writer, seeker and leader.
The first in a two-volume biography of Gandhi (1869–1948) by a seasoned Indian scholar distinguishes itself from legions of others by its clarity and many facets.
Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, 2007, etc.) relishes Gandhi’s inconsistencies (“Sometimes he behaved like an unworldly saint, at other times like a consummate politician”) and has evidently delved beyond his collected works for material—e.g., unexplored letters to colleagues, children and even his enemies. Spanning his subject’s early era, the author moves from Gandhi’s rather middling upbringing in the merchant caste of Kathiawar in the western Indian state of Gujarat, the youngest son of a polygamous civil-servant father and a pious, vegetarian mother. He then examines Gandhi’s revelatory law apprenticeship in London, the attempts at establishing himself as a barrister in Bombay, and the discovery of his livelihood and life’s calling defending Indians and Muslims against discriminatory policies in the Transvaal, South Africa. Being a vegetarian law student in London brought the young Gandhi into the eclectic circle of the London Vegetarian Society, influenced by the work of Henry Salt. Gandhi also befriended numerous people of different religions and backgrounds, cultivating the kinds of rich friendships across class, ethnic and gender lines that defined his evolving work as a social reformer. Married as a teenager, he was always aware of having to provide for his family and educate his sons, a duty that spurred him initially to ply his trade as a journeyman lawyer in Durban. Establishing the newspaper Indian Opinion in 1903, he wrote copiously, developing his ideas on diet, moral economy and passive resistance. Upon reading John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi moved the newspaper out to Phoenix, outside of Durban, in the first experiment in utopian self-sufficiency.
Guha offers a full, relaxed portrait of how the “Mahatma” came to be, as he gained his voice as a writer, seeker and leader.Pub Date: April 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53229-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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