The Bridge by David Remnick Picador From too little,suddenly there was too much about Barack Obama,everywhere. Yet,we somehow felt that the man kept eluding us. Who,really,is Obama? What made him? How is the Obama style of administering tied to the pillars and fault lines of his personality? Answers to these still fundamental questions may justify another book on Obama. But New Yorker editor and Pulitzer winner David Remnick provides more. The Bridge investigates Obamas being and becoming under the weight of American socio-political history and attempts to see beyond the obvious in assessing a man who is himself a chapter in history. A black father securing a Western education with the aim of returning to his native Kenya to effect political-intellectual change,in the process failing both in that objective and as a father; a white mother adapting more firmly to the Third World and laying the foundation of her sons moral and intellectual self,even as that son obsessed over the fathers identity and struggled to work out his own; the parents story fits the historical grooves of the era,but what about Hawaii and its more liberal,laidback racial mores? Remnick,however,perhaps displays an obsession with race that the president himself,as in his political life and in his interview to Remnick,denies. Undoubtedly one of the best books on Obama,The Bridge seems to inadequately study what makes the Obamas so mainstream,not in the least marginal. Keeping the Faith: Memoirs of a Parliamentarian by Somnath Chatterjee HarperCollins Somnath Chatterjees tenure as Lok Sabha Speaker stretched across the spectrum of the dramatic. His memoirs were therefore eagerly awaited ever since he had hinted at writing them at the end of the 14th Lok Sabha. Chatterjee,as Speaker,had dominated headlines for rebuking MPs on their conduct,for his laments over House working days lost and the dismal attendance record of members. But the culmination of the drama was Chatterjees expulsion from the CPM when he refused to abide by its diktat during the July 2008 trust vote. By the end of his term as Speaker,Chatterjee had formed distinct opinions about House functioning and reforms based,of course,not only on those five years in charge,but also on his long parliamentary career. The book promises to offer not only significant and anecdotal history but also ideas about legislative business itself. At Home by Bill Bryson Random House Bill Bryson is back,and this time he brings his unique talent for human observation and witty style to a history of all that is contained within the place we call home. At Home should be entertaining and compelling if he brings the same sharp wit,probing analysis and effortless humour that made A Short History of Nearly Everything one of the biggest books of the last decade. Bryson argues that houses arent refuges from history. They are where history ends up. He passes over historys traditional subjects battles,wars and great people in favour of examining how generations of ordinary people went about their day-to-day lives. In the process,he discovers that echoes of humankinds most pivotal discoveries can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live today. The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom a chance to meditate on sex,death and sleep; the kitchen an opportunity to discuss nutrition and the spice trade. Beginning from a journey around his own family home in Norfolk,this book touches upon topics as wide-ranging as architecture,electricity,crinolines and toilets. Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens Atlantic Arguably one of the Wests most controversial thinkers,Christopher Hitchens is often accused of being an enigma. He ardently opposed the war in Vietnam,but has more recently spoken in favour of US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. At various points during his lifetime,he has defined himself as a Marxist,a socialist and a libertarian. In his memoir Hitch 22,readers should be able to understand better this sea-change in political sympathies. Hitchens traces his journey from a childhood spent in an English boarding school,through his formative Oxford student days,to his long and eventful career as a journalist and public intellectual. Hitchens scope is wide-ranging,from discussing the aftermath of his mothers suicide to explaining the nuances of his religious views. Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel Hamish Hamilton All of us who read Life of Pi (2001) and were fascinated by the adventures (and the underlying spiritual conundrum) of Pi were half-expectant that the next work from Yann Martels stable would also rise above mere story-telling. Beatrice and Virgil promises not to disappoint,with its intense probing as to whether historical realism is the only way of talking about the Holocaust,and what the application of an imaginative thread might add to the tradition. Martel does so,making the eponymous Beatrice and Virgil (a stuffed donkey and monkey respectively,in a taxidermists shop),charter an allegorical landscape filled with unspeakable horrors. The names evoke the obvious allusion to The Divine Comedy,where Dante is guided through inferno and purgatory to paradise,and to the pain of the Holocaust,when Virgil asks,Oh,Beatrice,how are we going to talk about what happened to us one day when its over? The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell HarperCollins Before the sex or the city,there was Carrie Bradshaw. This is her at 17 a high-school senior in a Connecticut small town,coping with life without the girls or her Manolo Blahniks. There are the vintage white go-go boots,though,that she wears on her first day in senior school. And no,shes not sipping Cosmopolitan (these are,ugh,the Eighties,you know),but whos to stop her from sneaking into bars once in a while for a swig of the Singapore Sling? Candace Bushnells latest is a book written for young adults though thats not going to deter Sex and the City fans from snapping up the back story of the iconic character. Theres Carrie dreaming of a career in New York City. Theres love: Sebastian Kydd,the mysterious newcomer in school. And there are glimpses of the sexual anthropologist,as she muses about love,friends and the merciless social system of high school. The book ends with Carries going to The City for the summer for a writing course,where she meets a 20-something Samantha Jones. Thats the beginning of something,now,isnt it? Day Scholar by Siddharth Chowdhury Picador Shokeen Niwas is a hostel for boys in Delhi Universitys North Campus,run on a tight leash by Zorawar Singh Shokeen,a strapping six-foot-two-inches tall half-Jat half-Gujjar with a love for deep pink or lemon-yellow silk shirts and a man with many uses for the Capitals powerful politicians. The house comes in handy for pleasure and business for rendezvous with his mistresses; and as an easy source of muscle power whenever young boys are needed to run amok in the campus. In this aggressively male world,run on the simple rules of caste,class and region,the young narrator Hriday survives by the daily act of reading and writing. Patna Roughcut (2005),Siddharth Chowdhurys debut novel on the slow death of dreams in small-town India,gave us a refreshing voice and unsentimental realism. Could this be the definitive Delhi noir? The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction Vol. 2 Translated by Pritham Chakravarthy Blaft Publications Two summers ago,a publishing house with an unusual name delivered us from the boredom of ponderous Big Books with a translation of the works of 10 best-selling Tamil pulp fiction writers. Blaft to us grateful people now is all things fun. This summer,they give us the second volume of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. This volume promises as much guiltless pleasure,with an emphasis on mystery and horror. Check out the doe-eyed sexy mami on the cover,black hair spread out in waves,calmly sipping blood from a white skull. Indra Soundar Rajan,the author of a trifling number of short novels (500),is here: Chakravarthy has chosen a longer story by Rajan,The Palace of Kottaipuram,which is about a generations-old curse affecting a family of feudal lords. Rajesh Kumar,he of the 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories,is back with a grisly detective story,Hello,Dead Morning. Among the new names is Indumathi,usually associated with serious Tamil literature and the only woman author in the collection. The translator has picked a horror novel she wrote in 1979. Expect a high body count. A special addition is a Karate Kavitha comic,dated 1980,by Jeyaraj and Pushpa Thangadorai. Kavitha who? She wears bell bottoms. She rides a motorcycle. She jumps out of moving trains. She beats up the bad guys. She falls in love with an archaeologist. She even shows a little bit of nipple. Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan HarperCollins As the American economy skittered and skidded,almost everyone seemed to recall an August evening in Wyoming in 2005. The best of economists had gathered to do their version of attaboy,well done to Alan Greenspan,who was retiring as the chairman of the US Federal Reserve,when one person got up to spoil the celebration: Raghuram Rajan. The former chief economist at the IMF came up with a doomsday paper on whether financial development has made the world riskier and pointed to the possibility of a full blown financial crisis. The wrath of the Wall Street fell on him. But he was proven right in less than three years and the heretic was immediately venerated as prescient hero. Now in his new book,as he said in an interview,he goes back to how the macro economy runs: Why is it that the US is focused so much on consumption? Why have our policies pushed credit?. Why is it that stimulus,both monetary and fiscal,is so much stronger in the US than in other countries? And then how does this relate to what the rest of the world is doing? So,link it back together to,Here is the gap,the fault line. How do we bridge that? Maybe not the best thing to ponder while vacationing on the beach,but Rajan warns that worse disasters are round the corner if the financial faults arent fixed. Seasons of Flight by Manjushree Thapa Viking She is the raconteur of contemporary Nepal for the world outside. In 2005,her book Forget Kathmandu was the one that South Asia turned to,to figure out the Himalayan country locked in coups and coups within coups. Her new novel moves between the US and Nepal. Prema,who works in a bazaar that becomes a battle zone for the Maoists and the army,wins the US governments diversity visa lottery and reaches Los Angeles. She leaves behind wars and worries,but ends up in the ghetto called Little Nepal,that doesnt seem too different from Big Nepal. But she also finds love in a way that might not have been possible in her hill town. The Inspector and Silence by Hakan Nesser Pan Its rather difficult not to like Inspector Van Veeteren. The middle-aged Chief Inspector of Police is a man of good taste,he listens to Brahms or Dvorak on his way to the Police Headquarters,enjoys good food and wine and has wired his mood according to the weather. And no matter how grisly a crime is,nothing can take him away from a good game of badminton with his colleague Munster. What makes such a man tick? Intuition,and Van Veeteren depends on it as much as a woman does. And hes going to need a lot of that in The Inspector and Silence,the latest thriller by Swedish crime writer Hakan Nesser. A girl disappears from a summer camp of an obscure sect called Pure Life. Days later her raped and murdered body is found by another woman who reports the crime. But the inspector cannot be sure about the second womans identity. What makes everything so very impossible is that the sect leader and members of Pure Life only respond to his questions with silence. Public pressure to find the killer is setting him on the edge but Van Veeteran knows that he must wait for that precise moment when the motive will begin to make sense to him. Almost like waiting for the final aria of the opera. Motive is music to his ears. The Elephants Journey by Jose Saramago,translated by Margaret Jull Costa Random House When we finally arrive in Ithaca,we may find that it has nothing more to offer. We should be glad for the journey itself,enriched with the experience. Most of all,we should never speed it. At 86,an ailing Jose Saramago has produced a book based on a little-known history. Its the tale of an Indian elephant called Solomon who,along with mahout Subhro,travels from Lisbon to Vienna as a wedding gift from King John III of Portugal to Archduke Maximilian. Originally brought to Lisbon from the Portuguese colonies in India,Solomon has long lost his novelty. Now they set off on a journey across the continent,suffer ordeals,but animal and master grow attached to each other like never before. Solomon arrives in Vienna with the reputation of a sainted miracle worker. But on his death,he is skinned and umbrella stands are made out of his legs. The paucity of facts makes Saramago fictionalise and turn the work into an odyssey that explores,apart from the authors political concerns,the depth of friendship that results from sharing only the most essential comforts under adversity. Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb Picador This is not just a bottom-up history of Paris nor is it a mere documentation of its wilder margins. The adventurer is the author,British historian Graham Robb,who rode the back streets on a bicycle to animate his earlier work,The Discovery of France (2007). In Parisians,radical experimentation with form (unusual in writing a history) combines with the idiosyncrasy of subject to produce an illustrated volume that educates,enlightens and entertains with subterranean or marginal facts (often unyielding to foolproof verification) that aggregate to the textbook edifice of history,and connect the dots of epic moments. Unsurprisingly,it employs multiple perspectives. In some ways,Parisians is how a history of Paris would be written by Every Parisian. The story of the city begins with the French Revolution and ends with the 2005 riots,but this dispenses with the narrative trajectory followed by the usual historian. Want to revisit the streets in 1968,or trace Miles Davis tryst with Juliette Gréco? Take the tour with Robb and learn where,when and how Napoleon lost his virginity,or what makes immigrants to France angry. Above all,Robb has a sense of humour. Leela: A Patchwork Life by Leela Naidu with Jerry Pinto Viking Three years before she died in July 2009,Leela Naidu started writing a memoir,with help from the author Jerry Pinto. Hers was both an extraordinary and an ordinary life. Jean Renoir taught her how to act and Salvador Dali used her as a model for a Madonna. She acted in Hrishikesh Mukherjees Anuradha,Merchant-Ivorys The Householder and Shyam Benegals Trikaal. She was also married,the mother of twins and divorced before she was 20. For much of her life,she was husband Dom Moraess muse,then his secretary and,when he was interviewing Indira Gandhi,his translator (interpreting his mumbling questions). She edited magazines,dubbed Hong Kong action movies,produced documentaries and made a film for JRD Tata. Sargent House,Colaba,where they lived and entertained,was a salon for artists. This is a version of the world she lived of music and plush hotels,of a Russian count and inflatable rubber bras. Chef by Jaspreet Singh Viking CANADA-BASED Jaspreet Singhs debut novel is about Kirpal Singh,or Kip,a military chef by profession,who returns to Kashmir after a gap of 14 years to prepare the wedding meal of his former bosss daughter. Memories from his previous stint in Kashmir provide the bulk of action,as Kip,whose job is to keep the top brass healthy and cheerful,provides an unusual perspective to what is an intractable problem to the rest of the world. Cooking is creative and satisfying,and provides a powerful contrast to the desolation of glaciers that double as battlefields,the despondency of troops fighting a battle without end,the little human tragedies that get subsumed by the larger political narrative,and how our moral coordinates are shaken when the enemy from across the border is not a burly fanatic,but a young,suffering woman. Dayanita Singh by Dayanita Singh Penguin Studio A retrospective collection that brings together 100 pictures (some previously unpublished) of photographer Dayanita Singh is essentially a collectors item. They include photographs taken way back in 1989,when she started working on Myself,Mona Ahmed (Scalo,2001),a visual narrative based on the life of Mona,a eunuch,to works as recent as 2008. The cover,a stark but stunning visual that had been part of Singhs earlier caption-less collection Go Away Closer (Steidl,2007),shows a young girl in school uniform,her face,and hence her expression hidden from the camera,as she draws an unidentified object close to her. Such haunting presences are typical of Singhs work,as are her frequent depictions of absent presences,frames without people,connoting actions past or those awaited. Dayanita Singh is accompanied by essays by Sunil Khilnani and Aveek Sen,the latter having already placed Singhs family portraits in the high aesthetic traditions of Vermeer,Velazquez and Sargent.
