Accidental Blogger
A general interest blog
Category: Books, Authors & Poems
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I read about amma and her saree, and I see the Ukrainian and Polish babuskas, the aunties and uncles of my childhood. And there are the low, fleece lined boots and apron from beneath another woman’s sweater.
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I am only now done with the October 17th New Yorker – I read the magazine at a leisurely pace and in its paper version. The two book reviews published in the issue caught my eye and elicited two completely disparate reactions. Adam Kirsch's commentary on David Lodge's novel A Man of Parts, a thinly disguised biography of H.G. Wells is delightful, both because the book in question describes the prolific literary…
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The passing of Steve Jobs understandably prompted a chorus of grief and eulogy among his fans, along with refrains of the usual hyperboles voiced during his lifetime in praise of his genius and technological vision. Although I admire the evident courage he exhibited during his final years as he struggled with his health, I have…
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On the occasion of his 130th birth anniversary, I urge you to read this early post of mine – a tribute to P.G. Wodehouse, one of my favorite writers who regaled his fans with endless hours of mindless fun.
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“…[Elizabeth] Kolbert is repeating the Anglo-Protestant Black Legend about the Spaniards, rooted in the rivalries and sectarianism of the 16th and 18th centuries, but persisting down amongst English speaking secular intellectuals. The reality is that the Spaniards did not want to kill the indigenous peoples [of the Americas], they died of disease and the societal…
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It's always good when a book gets embroiled in a controversy, it makes for more attention and publicity for both the book and the 'libellee'. The book in question is Siddhartha Deb's 'The Beautiful and the Damned : A Portrait of the New India', the title needing a subtitle to differentiate it from F.Scott Fitzgerald's…
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In high school I fell in love with the book, “One Two Three … Infinity,” by George Gamov. It gave me a feel for numbers including an introduction to infinity. It was the beginning of a life-long interest in Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity. That life-long interest expanded into Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics.
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Fibonacci's 'Numbers': The Man Behind The Math (Norman Costa) In 1202 Fibonacci published his "Book of Calculation." Eight centuries later we have Arabic numerals and "Quicken – Deluxe Edition." Though generations of schoolchildren have cursed arithmetic, the world was a much more inconvenient place without it. Before the advent of modern arithmetic in the 13th…
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Much as I would have loved to review this very excellent book at length, I will give that ambitious notion a pass. I just read Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne for my book club. During the animated discussion at our last meeting, the majority opinion was that the book is a great read and also that it disabused us of many of our previously held beliefs about…
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Stanley Fish's latest book has not surprisingly generated a large number of reviews. Etc. It is How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, and it aims apparently to help the reader to write and read sentences. I have read and continue to enjoy Fish's literary theoretical work and his later work applying…
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The book came out two years ago. One look at the blurb : "A winner…Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters…Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist." -USA Today, and I decided to take a pass. I revisited the decision and finally tackled the book a couple of weeks ago, and am…
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A very nice interview with poet, author and artist Sukrita Paul Kumar in Muse India. I am publishing the full interview by GSP Rao below. Dr Sukrita Paul Kumar, scholar, critic and poet of great sensitivity, has done significant work in diversified areas like women’s studies, literary translations, and cultural diversity and literary traditions of…
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“According to a new biography by Joseph Lelyveld, the love of Mahatma Gandhi’s life was a German-Jewish bodybuilder named Hermann Kallenbach. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.””
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The sanctification of a human being is a slow process, taking months or even years to accomplish. It begins with careful wordings and rewordings of the early life stories, followed by more scholarly but carefully culled compedia as the years and paper trails grow in number and intricacy. The end point is inevitably the post-mortem,…
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It seems there is an overabundance of books about India in the market; writers, native as well as foreign born, are weighing in. While some of the publications are about India's history and politics, others deal with the more amorphous concept of "India as an experience" which of course, must deal with the country's history but may also contain a generous dose…
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