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
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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