A page-turning, eye-opening biography that shatters our impressions of India as established by the British Raj.
Lal (South Asian History/Emory Univ.; Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness, 2013, etc.) shines a light on Nur Jahan (1577-1645), who ruled as co-sovereign in the Mughal court, taking her husband’s place without actually usurping him.
Before she ascended, her husband, Jahangir, had fallen victim to overindulgence in drink and opium, and she slowly assumed duties with his full support. Jahangir was mercurial, ill-tempered, but he loved the signs of royal power. His traveling procession consisted of hundreds of tents draped in velvet and brocade, an audience hall of more than 70 rooms with 1,000 carpets, a harem, and stables. He inherited none of his father’s empire-building drive, but he was a patron of the arts, hunter, naturalist, mystic, and book lover. He loved statistics and traveled mainly to make measurements of flora and fauna and catalog the characteristics of his country. He saw his wife as highly intelligent, talented, and politically savvy, which was due in large part to an aristocratic upbringing in her Persian parents’ household. Rather than serving as a quiet counselor and smoothing relations between the emperor and his sons, Nur took direct action. She was an accomplished adviser, hunter, diplomat, and aesthete. She designed her parents’ tomb in Agra, anticipating the Taj Mahal, which was built by her stepson, Shah Jahan. Agra was also home to her designs for her and Jahangir’s tombs and her famous Light Scattering Garden. The author’s descriptions of Agra are superb, and her detailed explanations of Nur’s upbringing reflect her long study, deep understanding, and modern take on a little-explored subject. When the emperor was kidnapped by his son’s ally, it was Nur who led an army to attempt his rescue. She must be held as one of history’s great independent, powerful women.
A page-turning, eye-opening biography that shatters our impressions of India as established by the British Raj.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-23934-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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