Attica locke biography of mahatma
To be the recipient of a steady harvest of real, old fashioned paper and boards books is great delight mitigated only by my own limitations as a reader— I receive as many books in a week or two as I can realistically read in a year. Thus the glass-half-full, glass- half-empty aspect of such good fortune. Of course it is best not to dwell on such distracting thoughts.
Recently, I have been all over the map in my current reading forays: the hard scrabble of Newfoundland in the 19th century in’s wonderous (Other Press); all over the USA as Thomas Perry reprises The Butcher’s Boy inThe Informant (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt);rural, small town Iowa , Chicago and a few other places in Jean Thompson’s well- told (SImon & Schuster); a brief trip to Cuba and 1950’s New York and back to Germany with’s 7th Bernie Gunther novel (Putnam); Fargo, North Dakota and Canada in Joaanna Skibrud’s Giller Award winning novel The Sentimentalists (WW Norton) , Oslo (Norway) and its surroundings with hard boiled homicide detective Harry Hole in (Knopf) and thye killing fields of the first World War’s western front in’s engaging : A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton MIfflin Harcourt) .
By the way, Amy Goodman chats with Hochchild about his new opus. Need I point out his thoughts on the War to End all Wars have present day currency?
And here’s the books I have received recently:
Seven Years -Peter Stamm, Michael Hofmann (Translator) Other Press
Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis–Suez and the Brink of War– David. A. Nichols (Simon & Schuster )
Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella– Neil Lanctot (Simon & Schuster)
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India– Joseph Lelyveld (Knopf)
The Pale King– David Foster Wallace, Michael Pietsch (Editor) ( Little Brown)
Imagining Mars: A Literary History :Early Classics of Science Fi Gandhi’s presence in the 20th century, a century that perfected the arts of extermination, is weirdly arresting. His life seems peculiarly unhoused in the violent landscape of his times. How, by what twist of historical fate, did this frail, ungainly man with teapot ears, whose figure wrapped in handspun cloth evoked a faded archetypal memory of saintliness, wander into the modern world; and how, for a time, did he electrify it? What was he doing there, and what can the trace of his presence mean to us today, balanced precariously as we are on the edge of a fearful period--a period of violence, of retaliation and counter-retaliation, the proverbial eye for an eye? More than 50 years after his violent death at the hands of a Hindu fanatic in 1948, Gandhi has become a symbol and a myth. Yet we are still far from taking the measure of his enigmatic and remarkable personality. Confronted by the vast corpus of his writings and speeches (his collected works make up a 100-volume monument), interpreters continue to quarrel, seeing him variously as a spiritual paragon, a wily politician, a psychological and anthropological curiosity, an inventor of political techniques of nonviolence and civil disobedience or as a critic of modernity. In trying to make sense of him, perhaps the safest clue is to be found in his famous plea: “My writings should be cremated with my body. What I have done will endure, not what I have said or written.” Fortunately for us, the traces of what he did have been repeatedly and fascinatingly captured in that distinctive 20th century medium, half documentary-half art: photography. It is hard to think of a public figure more photographed than Gandhi --as if even during his lifetime people recognized that the only way to convey something of his force was through physical images of his presence. We have now in one volume a magnificent, luminous collection of photographs of Gandhi, assembled by Pete Overall Performance Story On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.... Ved Mehta is a man of the world because he had no choice. Blind since age 4, rootless since his teens, Mehta, a California-educated native of India and author of 18 wide-ranging books, has lived on three continents through the whims of history and personal fate. Rootlessness is a kind of home, he believes, one that he shares with many other modern writers, including his fellow countryman, novelist Salman Rushdie, under a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for his novel “The Satanic Verses.” “In order to feel dislocated, you have to belong somewhere,” says Mehta, currently a visiting fellow at England’s Oxford University. “I feel I really don’t belong anywhere. I really belong to the 20th-Century population of displaced persons, refugees.” Yet Mehta, a naturalized American citizen, has maintained connections with his past, occasionally visiting his native country and other wellsprings of his long-running autobiography, “Continents of Exile,” whose sixth volume has just been published. This option, he fears, may never again be open to Rushdie, who is in hiding somewhere in Great Britain. “Some of this reaction (to “Satanic Verses”) was predictable from square one--not the death sentence,” Mehta said in an interview while on a visit to Southern California. “But I wish someone had told him along the way that you just can’t write this particular way because certainly he’s going to be cut off from the very source of his creativity.” Considered Blasphemous Rushdie’s bitter, satirical, allegorical novel--the spark of riots, bombings and more than a score of deaths in India and Pakistan--is considered blasphemous by many Muslims because it casts doubt on central tenets of the Muslim religion. Among other things, it suggests that the Prophet Mohammed wrote the Koran, Islam’s holy book, rather than receiving it through the divine inspiration of God. Mehta, a Hindu who met the Muslim Rushdie when the two were doing a se
The Magnificent, Puzzling Self-Creations of Gandhi
Murder
In Cold Blood
Creative nonfiction at its best...!!!
Ved Mehta Ruminates on Rushdie Furor