India Books

Insight Guide Bali is an exceptional travel guide. The history is well written and rich with interesting facts. I reads like a good novel. The maps are deteiled with plenty of cross references. There are plenty of travel tips from riding a bus to how to order food without MSGS. It appears that every possible travel issue has been addressed; from how not to get arrested to finding the swank resorts. The book is worth the price just for the exquisite pictures. I have never seen a travel book with photos as exceptional as these. Usually I purchase a couple of guide books before going to a new location, but this time I will only use the Insight Guide Bali.

I read the history background like a novel. The cultural information such as the drama, the dances, the religion, the art etc. is great. The photos are great too. I am back from Bali and I just take this book with me.

Swami Vivekananda was one of the greatest thinkers and teachers the world has ever produced. His talks are not for Hindus only. They transcend all barriers of religion and caste and are helpful for anyone who wants to realize God. His books are a must for any serious student of Philosophy.

Vivekananda, disciple of Ramakrishna, conducted a retreat for seven weeks with twelve followers near New York, a hundred years ago. One pupil noted down several of his inspired talks. This book contains those talks plus some additional material, mostly lectures of Vivekananda.

The talks are spiriutally very deep going, but not systematic at all. They are based on hinduism but use christian und buddhist terminology, as well. The book is very helpful if one practices hinduism. If one does not do so, the book would be rather meaningless, because the sayings were meant for close disciples, who knew what he meant and what it was all about.

An Irish History of Civilization, Vol. 1: An astonishingly comprehensive and extremely idiosyncratic combination of anecdotes shared through fiction, fact, and faction--in more than one sense of that last word. The title is misleading, of course. "How the Irish Saved Civilisation" this is not. In an 800+ page work starting with S/Paul of Tarsus and ending as the Great Famine looms, this collects, in the fashion of the Uruguayan storyteller Eduardo Galeano's three-volume History of Fire did so well two decades ago for Latin America: Akenson displays a collage of people, events, and situations that span roughly 18 centuries. This first volume assembling two "books" through smaller regionally-centered chapters that alternate and appear as the chronology spreads the Irish across the globe, stops before the Great Famine; the second volume will continue the story, of not only the Irish, up to us.

Why start so far back? First, Christianity and its separation from Rabbinic Judaism establishes the missionary momentum that impels the gospel towards Hibernia--well before St. Patrick. Second, Akenson is not only an historian of Ireland but of Judaism at this time, and he seeks to give us a talmudic take on not only all things Irish, but how the Irish diaspora--as with that of the Jews--swirled over nearly all of the planet as colonisation, technology, and ambition all drove the Irish into every corner of the Commonwealth, and far beyond even its ever-expanding domains. Third, what worked for Paul worked for Pat: they both knew how to lay on the shame and then offer their hearers the remedy--baptism. Akenson links Patrick's nagging mistrust of the body--based on an intelligent if inevitably speculative interpretation of his crucial letter admitting a secret sin--with a culturally Irish desire to save face. This union of shame with its antidote resulted in his success, legendary or historical--since Christianity quickly spread. How? Patrick knew how to manipulate the pride and the status of those nobles listening to Patrick's exhortations, and once these influential Irish leaders capitulated, their followers with little resistance humbly and inevitably followed suit.

Akenson emphasizes a few key points among thousands of equally thoughtful, if less consistently repeating but historically inspired situations that speckle his vivid vignettes. First, the Irish, until the Famine, were as much characterised by Protestant as by Catholic emigres. Next, many of these same Irish contrary to the lore of Orange lodges and parochial catechisms alike, hopped back and forth over the supposed sectarian divide much more nimbly and often for less than sanctified reasons--usually relating to marriage, wealth, survival, pragmatism, and/or ambition. Also, these claim-jumpers complicate any descendent's assertion that one's Irish ancestors were forever faithful to the true Faith, whichever one that may have been. Not to overlook that many Irish found Canada--with its legacy from the French of comparatively greater religious toleration and a more congenial cultural climate than that of the United States--a more appealing destination that until the Famine rivalled or bested the U.S. in its Irish contingents.

Finally, also contrary to custom, the Irish were not "black slaves in white skin." Akenson rejects a lazy Marxist superstructure thrust upon the quicksands of historical certainty. Nearly every tale he tells challenges 'fact'. Barbados may have been unpleasant, but freedom awaited those even if convicted or indentured, which was more than their African and Indian counterparts could expect. Akenson never lets us escape the uncomfortable legacy of the Irish throughout worlds, New perhaps more often than Old: they were happily as much victimisers as they were victims on behalf of British Civilisation as We Know It. Montserrat--where briefly an Irish-dominated 'republic' showed no less mercy towards its darker inhabitants from its sunburned social climbers--and the other slave-dominated Caribbean islands provide a particularly rueful surfeit of plenty to back up this claim. Republicans, throughout these pages, often turn coats rapidly, and more often than not find England a convenient refuge after their activism ceases. More than one family tree hides both those judged heroes as well as those who later generations would call traitors. Akenson insists that no Irish truism as to loyalty on either side of the divides long built can remain impervious to the steady nudge of the historian's trowel beneath these sectarian and ideological facades. Religion and ideology prove more flags of convenience than banners for processions when genealogies are scrutinised. The Irish had the comparative luxury in those harsh early modern centuries of a choice to leave their island hell for an island less romanticised but more profitable for many gamblers and chancers--those willing to manipulate the slave economy, rig the sugar or pirate trades, and spin its imperialist wheels and capitalist roulette to their advantage.

That is, the Irish may have been driven to emigrate through undoubted hard times and few prospects, but few went unwillingly, and far more left with little regret as they sailed as close as Liverpool or as far away as the antipodes. Even the convicts shipped off for political reasons, Akenson argues, constituted only about 1.5% of those transported to Australia; the ODC's, moreover, were far more often indecent if all too ordinary: careerist criminals the norm rather than doe-eyed innocents trussed and tossed for stealing a loaf of bread.

If this was all, it could have been expressed in far fewer pages. This book took me about 10 nights of quite a lot of free time to finish; and I admit I did read quickly. The pace, luckily, prevents you from nodding off, and the bite-size slices of his history encourage nibbling. Akenson has a like it or leave it narrative style. The book did not weary me except in propping up its considerable bulk. I can't, however, award this less than a rare five stars. This quirky compilation creates rhythms that invade my reveries.

Happily, no mean feat in these days of expensive productions from university presses, this (Montreal/Kingston-printed McGill-Queen's UP/London, Granta Books) offering provides great value for the money. Yes, perhaps if I was editor I might dare to excise a couple of hundred pages. But, as I am sure Akenson himself asserted, which pages to be cut would be debated and deflected eloquently by their creator.

In its abundance, its rationalism, and its attitude, the result's reminiscent of the Enlightenment writers who cultivated a loftier distance from the fools that we mortals be, but not without a soft spot for the dreams, comforts, and illusions even the best educated and most rational share with the rest of us less benighted proles. Harvard and Yale taught him; he has written dozens of books and won prizes and earned richly endowed (undoubtably) chairs at prestigious universities. But, he still has the common touch--if that touch bears scorn perhaps a bit more often than sentiment. Akenson's more akin to Voltaire rather than Rousseau.

Consider, if you're wondering if this book's for you, these sorts of descriptions. 'Spenser, like Raleigh, was a man whose hard and instinctive brutality was constantly being overlimed with a wash of chivalry; and that wash then was enhued into a mural, one so graceful that the viewer forgot that the artist had used a pigment whose fixative was blood.' (161) This shows characteristically Akenson's choice of the arresting metaphor, the slightly erudite (and sometimes overly recondite, as he is wont to use archaic verbs that echo long-discarded Hiberno-anglicisms) word selection, and the graceful balance of his demotic but persistently graceful clauses.

He compares one memorable figure, the Jewish George Benjamin who led Canada's Orange Lodges (this is not a misprint), in his own horse-mounted posture to 'a sphere upon a pine table.' (778) He can be funny. He can be dramatic. Tairoa, a Cook Islander in 1801, looks back at a British ship from which he, in his grab for fame, speared a 'pale angel': he is confounded when 'a long bamboo stick was pointed at him from the foreigner's vessel. He saw a light and heard a noise only a decasecond before his world exploded into searing pain, blinding sunshine, and a roaring of reef-shredded breakers. He fell dead in the bottom of his canoe.' (532-3)

Rewardingly, Akenson can be wise. He compares the labors of Robert Maunsell to translate the Bible into Maori to the far less laborious efforts over exactly the same number of years of Darwin, and wonders why we only praise the latter scholar. Perhaps, as he contemplates when conjuring up Emain Macha in 200 CE, Akenson through craft, cunning, and compassion, rescues history for the rest of us, who too are minor unsung figures in the long march to and from and through civilisation, here and there intersected by the Irish, however dimly recalled as our ancestors, conspirators, conquerors, or companions. Why, as Saul wonders in an opening scene, recite so much seemingly useless information, not only the praises of those famed like Darwin but those otherwise forgotten such as Maunsell? 'Professional remembers counted a lot. One cannot have a world run by aristocrats unless someone remembers who is a ruler and who a commoner or slave.' (61)

Akenson returns his story of the Irish and so many others to those of us who come from not only aristocrats and commoners and slaves--and, in these pages, the frequent frictions and couplings among and between all three factions. While many of the latter two categories remain nameless, and many others mere mentions in testimonies or ledgers, all--not only the first class usually granted that dubious honor--find their voices here. The noble and the servant, the Catholic, Protestant, a few Jews, and one Irishman deigned a Sikh deity (the inconclusive, almost Borgesian account of John Nicholson) all jostle for position. I will have to wait for the reading of the second volume, I suppose, to find out if there is more about this Anglo-Irish Sikh god. One of hundreds of characters here.

This surprisingly affordable and handsomely designed volume, the first "two books" comprising the first installment of two volumes, preserves these voices from Asia Minor to the ends of the earth as of 1845, where there always, as Akenson imagines it, can be found an Irish man or woman or someone who once was one, or once was engendered by, or once was owned by, or once knew one!

Mr. Murphy's review is actually for volume 1 (books 1 & 2). Prospective buyers, and esp. AMAZON itself should know that you would never find this volume 2 (books 3 & 4)on Amazon, unless you know, and search by, ISBN. For some bizarre reason, if you search by author or title, volume 2 just doesn't show up! Amazon has revamped its options for users to provide corrections - with the result that the above oddity cannot even be reported except here.

(H. R. F. Keating also writes the Inspector Ghote mystery series set in India.)

JACK, THE LADY KILLER is an unusual mystery because it's written in verse with illustrations. The first mystery I read in verse was Martha Grimes, SEND BYGRAVES, and I have been a fan of this unique style of story telling ever since. I am thrilled to say H.R.F. Keating's mystery in verse was just as unique and fun to read as SEND BRGRAVES.

Mr. Keating gives the author Vikram Seth credit for inspiring him after he read his verse novel THE GOLDEN GATE. He even quotes a verse of Vikram Seth's at the beginning of this mystery and I think those in the publishing business will get a kick out of it.

Mr. Keating's mystery takes place in 1935. Jack Steele, a new recruit to the Imperial Police Service in India is sent to take care of a panicked elephant. While he's gone someone murders widow Milly Marchbanks. With the District Superintendent in hospital Jack finds himself working the crime. A witness, a boy named "Little Brown Gramophone" tells Jack that just before Milly died she cried, " No, Jack, no! So searching for a member of the Briton Club named Jack should seem easy . . . but it isn't. The author takes the reader through the suspects, clues and emotions of Jack in verse.

If you haven't experienced a verse novel or mystery nows your chance. Don't miss it.

In 1935, England reigns over the Indian subcontinent. Just graduating from school, Jack Stealton arrives in Punjab, India to join the Imperial Police Service. His supervisor, FHR Guthrie makes sure the new recruit understands that he represents England at all times. It is imperative that he insures the locals never forget that he is a superior being. As the months pass, Jack easily acclimates to his new home. However, while playing tennis with Jack at an exclusive club, Guthrie collapses from heatstroke on the court.

Not to long after that incident, someone murders Milly Marchbanks, a sex-starved man-eater. Her last words are: "No Jack! No Jack!" Seven club members allegedly were sleeping when the killing occurred. Jack believes one of them is lying and is the killer. With his mentor hospitalized and unable to guide him, Jack leads the inquiry. This investigation will either change Jack into confident law enforcement official or find him in need of a new profession.

JACK, THE LADY KILLER is an unusual historical police procedural as this tale is written in verse. Narrative poetry such as THE HIGHWAYMAN or THE RHYME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER is risky. In this case, the poetic format works with the mystery fully unfolding like any novel would have done. The talented H.R.F. Keating succeeds in providing his audience with a feel for the era and interesting characters, especially Jack and Guthrie. The English air of superiority to the natives adds depth to the overall tale. This colorful narrative poem is unique and entertaining. Anyone seeking an enjoyable but different book, should try JACK, THE LADY KILLER because no one will feel Keating is cheating them with this reading.

Harriet Klausner

The author shares her memoirs of British India, through this clever narrative, shifting back and forth from present to past. Her story truly tugged at my heart. As each early 1940's memory unfolded, I became more involved with this little girl. Her fear, pain, shame, and disappointment, as well as her hope, excitement, joy, and love left me crying or cheering. There will be more, as this is the first of a trilogy. "Reprints" is my favorite of several of the author's poems, included after the narrative ends...for now.

Jackals' Wedding is a fascinating book about growing up in British India, and the authors' trip back as an adult trying to understand the mysteries of her childhood. Her family's buried secrets, particularly the mysterious disappearance of her father, make for an interesting exploration into the culture of the times and family dynamics.

I picked up this 500-plus page book on a Wednesday and barely put it down until it was completed on Saturday, four days later. I am anxiously awaiting the sequel.

A beautifully illustrated book with mesmerizing colours: an abundance of deep indigo, jungle greens, various shades of burnt orange, and of course the requisite fuschia. I very much enjoyed the play of colours in this book. With the cut paper collages and paintings, the fabrics flow with textures, layers and decorous patterns.

The story focuses on Sardul, a clever cat who schemes to have his master Jamil marry a princess. Reminiscent of Puss in Boots, when Jamil sighs and wishes he could marry the princess in the palace, Sardul responds "Give me the best waistcoat and the most beautiful sari we have made, Master, and I will make your dream come true."

History buffs should also note that Jamil's Clever Cat is shrewdly retold from "The Folk Tales of Bengal" originally published by the Rev. Lal Behari Day of Hooghly College, Bengal, in 1883.

A beautifully illustrated book with mesmerizing colours: an abundance of deep indigo, jungle greens, various shades of burnt orange, and of course the requisite fuschia. I very much enjoyed the play of colours in this book. With the cut paper collages and paintings, the fabrics flow eith textures, layers and decorous patterns.

The story focuses on Sardul, a clever cat who schemes to have his master Jamil marry a princess. Reminiscent of Puss in Boots, when Jamil sighs and wishes he could marry the princess in the palace, Sardul responds "Give me the best waistcoat and the most beautiful sari we have made, Master, and I will make your dream come true."

My four year old delighted in reading the book. I gave her some cut fabric and she pretended dressing up in a sari. I highly recommend this marvelously illustrated book.

History buffs shaould also note that Jamil's Clever Cat is shrewdly retold from "The Folk Tales of Bengal" originally published by the Rev. Lal Behari Day of Hooghly College,Bengal, in 1883.

Poetry flowing into prose, much as the river flows into the sea: that's how I felt when I read the book some years ago.
I love the way the book describes the life of Jaya side-by-side with the flow of the River Ganga in India. I felt as if I was journeying down the river with the main character.
It's interesting because you think of the river as something that Indians find pure, and even though the lives of the characters are more earthy and less pure, the author has found a way to meld them together.
This book is a travelogue and a work of fiction flowing together!
Why isn't the book easily available? I wanted to gift it to a friend, just as years ago it was gifted to me, and was unable to find it new.

Le Monde Diplomatique wrote about this book "Poetic, mystical, metaphysical, humorous, erotic, erratic, this book is all (of that).... a complete portrait of India". I totally agree! I found this book in a tiny bookstore in Ooty, Tamil Nadu in India and since then I've read it over and over again. It's an absolutely brilliant book! A fantastically well written story and it once changed my life

Great overview of this fascinating city. Freely is the expert on Istanbul and he brings the culture and history to life.

We bought this together with the D-K Guide to Istanbul Istanbul (Eyewitness Travel Guides) prior to visiting the city, and found them to be an excellent combination. Freely, an American who came to Istanbul in 1960, taught Physics at the Roberts Academy, later the University of the Bosphorus, but his real accomplishment has been to write a fine series of books about the city he loves so much. Devoting one chapter to each of the seven hills of the city, Freely does a great job of discussing their history, art and architecture.

Highly recommended.

A third guide worth considering is the Knopf guide. Knopf Guide: Istanbul (Knopf Guides Istanbul and Northwest Turkey) Less structured, it is far more broad-ranging and cotains some delightful surprises.

I i had an oppertunity to meet any one individual in history, Swami Chinmayananda would be one well worth considering. This book gives a subtle insight into the life an an evoltionalist who lived to bring about a spiritual renascence in India and the World. It covers the life of Swami Chinmayananda, in a way that leaves you captivated, I often find myself picking the book up again and again only to be further insipred with every chapter. I recommend it to eveyone!

This is an amazing tale of a real-life hero! Anyone interested in learning more about a renowned teacher and leader should read this book. Truly inspiring!

An excellent resource for those contemplating on the nature of existence, truth, human life, its origins, way of living and other philosophical questions but want simple, pragmatic, "to do" approach!

My salutations in the Divine Feet of this Great Teacher!

Author covers everything from the emergence of the fundamental particle, through the evolution of universe, evolution of life and links all with humankind up to the present. The importance of maintaining good health and universal brotherhood are also discussed