Rabindranath Tagore: An Illustrated Life

Between The World And Me

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates???s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son???and readers???the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children???s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Brief Candle In The Dark : My Life In Science

In An Appetite for Wonder Richard Dawkins brought us his engaging memoir of the first 35 years of his life from early childhood in Africa to publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, when he shot to fame as one of the most exciting new scientists of his generation. In Brief Candle in the Dark he continues his autobiography, following the threads that have run through the second half of his life so far and homing in on the key individuals, institutions and ideas that inspired and motivated him. He paints a vivid picture, coloured with wit, anecdote and digression, of the twenty-five postgraduate years he spent teaching at Oxford. He pays affectionate tribute to past colleagues and students, recalling the idiosyncrasies of an establishment steeped in ancient tradition and arcane ritual while also recording his respect for the profound commitment to learning and discovery that lies at its core. He invites us to share the life of a travelling scientist, from fieldwork on the Panama Canal to conferences of stratospheric eminence in exotic locations in the company of some of the most prominent of the world???s scientific luminaries. And he describes his experiences with his many publishers, television producers, interviewers and partners in debate, not least in the heady period when, after publication of The God Delusion in 2006, he is dubbed the world???s most outspoken and controversial atheist. Most important of all, for the first time he reviews with fresh and stimulating insights the evolving narrative of his ideas about science over the course of his highly distinguished career as thinker, teacher and writer. In Brief Candle in the Dark we are invited to enter with him a constantly stimulating world of discovery and to meet a fascinating cast of exceptional characters described by the talented pen of one of the most exceptional of them all.

Our Moon Has Blood Clots

Rahul Pandita was fourteen years old in 1990 when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family, who were Kashmiri Pandits: the Hindu minority within a Muslim-majority Kashmir that was becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of ???Azadi??? from India. The heartbreaking story of Kashmir has so far been told through the prism of the brutality of the Indian state, and the pro-independence demands of separatists. But there is another part of the story that has remained unrecorded and buried.Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the unspoken chapter in the story of Kashmir, in which it was purged of the Kashmiri Pandit community in a violent ethnic cleansing backed by Islamist militants. Hundreds of people were tortured and killed, and about 3,50,000 Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave their homes and spend the rest of their lives in exile in their own country. Rahul Pandita has written a deeply personal, powerful and unforgettable story of history, home and loss.

Roberto Bolano : The Last Interview

With the release of Roberto Bola??o???s "The Savage Detectives" in 1998,journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer ???capable of befriending his readers.??? After exchanging several letters with Bola??o, Maristain formed a friendship of her own, culminating in an extensive interview with the novelist about truth and consequences, an interview that turned out to be Bola??o???s last. Appearing for the first time in English, Bola??o???s final interview is accompanied by a collection of conversations with reporters stationed throughout Latin America, providing a rich context for the work of the writer who, according to essayist Marcela Valdes, is ???a T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American letters.??? As in all of Bola??o???s work, there is also wide-ranging discussion of the author???s many literary influences. (Explanatory notes on authors and titles that may be unfamiliar to English-language readers are included here.) The interviews, all of which were completed during the writing of the gigantic 2666, also address Bola??o???s deepest personal concerns, from his domestic life and two young children to the realities of a fatal disease.

Nehru : A Contemporary's Estimate

Elegant, perceptive, and startlingly prophetic, Nehru: A contemporary???s estimate is one of the finest accounts of Nehru ever written. Walter Crocker, the Australian high commissioner to India, admired Nehru the man ??? his grace, style, intelligence and energy ??? and was deeply critical of many of his political decisions ??? the invasion of Goa, India???s Kashmir policy, the Five Year Plans. This book, written shortly after Nehru???s death, is full of invaluable first hand observations about the man and his politics. Much of Crocker???s points, too ??? especially the implications of the Five Year Plans and of the introduction of democracy to India ??? are particularly relevant today. Out of print for many years, this classic biography has been reissued with a new foreword by Ram Guha.

Legacy : Letters From Eminent Parents To Their Daughters

Subcontinent. Seventy years later, the nations that came into being are yet to fully overcome a persistent.

Legal Eagles : The Story Of The Top Seven Indian Lawyers

Legal Eagles is an exciting read for all the budding lawyers and for all those who are interested in knowing about the life and struggle of great lawyers and how they achieve success in life through sheer grit and hard work . The top seven lawyers chosen by Indu Bhan as the subjects of her book are well known lawyers and have prolific personality worthy to be written about. The seven lawyers whose life and career has found a mention in the book are Harish Salve, Prashant Bhushan, Rohinton Nariman, Mukul Rohatgi, Abhishek Sangvi, CA Sundaram and Arvind Datar. A common link between all seven of them is that they all have been or are applying their trade in the Supreme Court of India. While some of them like Prashant Bhushan, Rohinton Nariman and Mukul Rohatgi carried on their family legacy of being lawyer, other like Harish Salve and Arvind Datar accidently landed upon this profession and are now the stalwarts of legal practice. Legal Eagles is filled with several details of high profile cases handled by these lawyers like Coalgate, Vodafone Tax Case etc. and also explains the psychological and emotional impact that these cases had on them. Not just their professional career, but we also catch a glimpse of their personal life in this book. We get a personal view of the life of these seven legal eagles of India as the author talks about their background, mentors, turning points in their life, what was their way to success, their struggles, daily routine etc.

Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the famous band The Doors, is known for his poetic vision and insatiable appetite for spiritual, sexual and psychedelic experiences. He was known for the way his music embodied the spirit and psyche of a generation. Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend takes its readers through the life events of Morrison, a man who was tortured by inner demons that controlled his creative energy and ultimately led him to self destruction. Each section of this book reveals a new phase of Morrison???s life, from his troubled youth in a strict military household to the tension and anger that built up in the band as their songs hit the top of the charts. Fans from the newer generation have appreciated his music but have also been exposed to as a series of myth that were created to cover the true character of James Douglas Morrison. As it nears the end, the book reconstructs Morrison???s last days in Paris in order to solve one of the greatest mysteries in music history in a shocking final chapter.

Gods Of The Morning : A Bird's Eye View Of A Highland Year

Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society Writers' Prize'No one writes more movingly, or with such transporting poetic skill, about encounters with wild creatures. Its pages course with sympathy, humility, and wisdom' Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk From his home deep in a Scottish glen, John Lister-Kaye has watched and come to understand intimately the movements and habits of the animals, and in particular the birds, that inhabit the wild and magnificent Highlands. Drawing on a lifetime of observation, Gods of the Morning is his wise and affectionate celebration of the British countryside and the birds that come and go through the year. It is also a lyrical reminder of the relationship we have lost with the seasons and a call to look afresh at the natural world around us.

Dreams From My Father

An international bestseller which has sold over a million copies in the UK, Dreams From My Father is a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking big questions about identity and belonging. The son of a black African father and a white American mother, President Obama recounts an emotional odyssey. He retraces the migration of his mother's family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father's life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

The Descent of Man

Grayson Perry has been thinking about masculinity - what it is, how it operates, why little boys are thought to be made of slugs and snails - since he was a boy. Now, in this funny and necessary book, he turns round to look at men with a clear eye and ask, what sort of men would make the world a better place, for everyone? What would happen if we rethought the old, macho, outdated version of manhood, and embraced a different idea of what makes a man? Apart from giving up the coronary-inducing stress of always being 'right' and the vast new wardrobe options, the real benefit might be that a newly fitted masculinity will allow men to have better relationships - and that's happiness, right? Grayson Perry admits he's not immune from the stereotypes himself - as the psychoanalysts say, 'if you spot it, you've got it' - and his thoughts on everything from power to physical appearance, from emotions to a brand new Manifesto for Men, are shot through with honesty, tenderness and the belief that, for everyone to benefit, upgrading masculinity has to be something men decide to do themselves. They have nothing to lose but their hang-ups.

My Family And Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals is the bewitching account of a rare and magical childhood on the island of Corfu by treasured British conservationist Gerald Durrell. Escaping the ills of the British climate, the Durrell family - acne-ridden Margo, gun-toting Leslie, bookworm Lawrence and budding naturalist Gerry, along with their long-suffering mother and Roger the dog - take off for the island of Corfu. But the Durrells find that, reluctantly, they must share their various villas with a menagerie of local fauna - among them scorpions, geckos, toads, bats and butterflies. Recounted with immense humour and charm My Family and Other Animals is a wonderful account of a rare, magical childhood.

The Diary Of A Young Girl

In July 1942, Anne Frank and her family fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation, hid in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. Anne was thirteen when the family went into the Secret Annexe, and over the next two years she vividly describes in her diary the frustrations of living in such confined quarters, the constant threat of discovery, hunger and tiredness, and, above all, the boredom. Her diary ends abruptly when she and her family were finally discovered by the Nazis in August 1944. The author was born on 12 June 1929 and died while imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, three months short of her sixteenth birthday. The book remains the single most poignant true-life story to emerge from the Second World War.

Complications : Notes From The Life of a Young Surgeon

Atul Gawande performs surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science that is complicated, perplexing and profoundly human. Dramatic true stories explore how mistakes occur, why good surgeons go bad, and what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain but no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won???t go away; a TV newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job.

Better : A Surgeon's Notes On Performance

Nowhere is the drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. Atul Gawande's gripping stories take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, delivery rooms in Boston, a polio outbreak in India, and malpractice courtrooms in the US. He discusses the ethical dilemma of lethal injections, examines the influence of money on modern medicine, and recounts the contentious history of hand-washing. And as in all his writing, he gives us an inside look at his own life as a surgeon.

Swami Vivekananda : The Living Vedanta

The Vedanta was an inseparable part of Swami Vivekananda???s personality. He lived and breathed this philosophy while preaching it to India and the west. While Vivekananda???s landmark address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 established him as modern India???s great spiritual leader, his popularity and appeal is attributed to his ability to integrate his human side with his profound spiritual side. In this beautifully written biography, Chaturvedi Badrinath liberates Vivekananda from the confines of the worship room and offers an unforgettable insight into the life of a man who was the very embodiment of the Vedanta that he preached.

Romancing With Life

In "Romancing with Life", the first-ever full-fledged memoir by a leading Bollywood star, Dev Anand tells his remarkable life story like only he can. Here are tales from Dev's youth in 1930s Gurdaspur and Lahore; his years of struggle in 1940s Bombay; his friendship with Guru Dutt and his doomed romance with Suraiya; his marriage to co-star Kalpana Kartik; his relationships with his brothers Chetan and Vijay Anand, with S.D. and R.D. Burman, with his compatriots Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor; to both of whom he was very close, and with his heroines from Geeta Bali, Madhubala, Meena Kumari, Nutan, Vyjayanthimala, Mumtaz and Hema Malini to Waheeda Rehman, Zeenat Aman and Tina Munim, all of whom he launched. Dev Anand has produced an unputdownable book chock-full of bittersweet reminiscences, written in a pacy, effervescent style that carries the reader through sixty of Bollywood's most interesting years. With rare pictures from his personal archive, "Romancing with Life" is the quintessential Dev Anand.

Me And Ma

"???Divya writes of difficult times with candour and heart-rending simplicity??? Shabana Azmi Capturing the beauty of a mother???daughter relationship, Divya Dutta in this moving memoir celebrates her mother???s struggles to turn her into the woman she is today. Divya walks us through the most intimate memories of her life, those that strengthened her relationship with her mother. The incredible bond she forged with her mother helped her through tragedies and difficulties, discouragements and failures and led her to become an award-winning actor of stature, both in the Hindi as well as the Punjabi film industry. Me and Ma is a celebration of Divya???s exemplary achievements. It is also an honest, intimate and heartfelt tribute to the force behind her success???her mother. "

Laurie Baker

"The Definitive Biography of Laurie Baker Laurie Baker has worked in India for over forty years and is renowned for being one of the very few architects in the world to have designed and built buildings as diverse as fishermen's huts, computer institutes, auditoriums, film studios and tourist centres. His distinctive brand of architecture, usually moulded around local building traditions (especially those of Kerela, his adopted home state in south India), is instantly identifiable and has, unsurprisingly, revolutionized traditional concepts of architecture in India. Baker's architecture is responsive, uses local materials and lays stress on low-cost design. This biograpy of Laurie Baker, like his work, is direct, simple and comprehensive; further embellished with sketches, plans, photographs and some of Baker's own writings, the book offers the professional architect view of the life, methods and thoughts of an unorthodox genius."