An immensely readable teaching tool.
A selection of brief biographies of some of the most brilliant minds and personalities over the long course of Indian history.
From Buddha to Dhirubhai Ambani, the self-created celebrity entrepreneur of Reliance Industries, these 50 chronological lives span politics, the arts, academics, and social reform and include a handful of women and a few Westerners by birth, as well. Indian scholar Khilnani (India Institute/King’s Coll. London; The Idea of India, 1998, etc.) takes a soft-pedaling approach, fleshing out the entries with enough historical context to render the narrative accessible for all readers and concluding with a discussion of the subject’s importance in the overall scheme. Mahavira, from the fifth century B.C.E., was the Jainist seeker and teacher whose core principles of many-sidedness, truth, and nonviolence Mohandas Gandhi later incorporated to groundbreaking effect. Early Brahmin thinker Panini (fourth century B.C.E.) set out an early distillation of the sacred language of Sanskrit, and Adi Shankara (eighth century C.E.) organized the plurality and diversity of Hindu scriptures. Lawyer and politician Ambedkar, born an “untouchable" in 1891, challenged the Brahminic hierarchy of class and enshrined rights for Dalits (his term, meaning “broken”) in the new Constitution of 1950. Khilnani also includes a variety of Muslim leaders—e.g., Pakistani founding spirit Muhammad Iqbal (b. 1877), a poet and lawyer who championed a spiritual democracy (the “ultimate aim of Islam”), and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a father of modern Pakistan whose shortsightedness is largely responsible for the disastrous violence following Partition of 1947. Some of the women include ecstatic religious poet Mirabai (1498-1557) and Congress Party leader Indira Gandhi (curiously, Indira's towering father, Nehru, is absent). William Jones and Annie Besant appear as important Westerners who immersed themselves in Indian languages and mores and inculcated the West. Khilnani’s choices are spirited, relevant, and aimed to provoke “pressing contemporary questions.”
An immensely readable teaching tool.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-17549-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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