A Brief History of Modern India (2019-2020 Edition) by Spectrum Books


Spectrum Books Pvt.Ltd.
    The political and socio-economic developments that have influenced the growth of modern India have been dealt with in independent chapters.

It's Easy To Cry


Subhas Anandan - 2015
    In the first volume of his autobiography The Best I Could (first published in 2008), Subhas Anandan covered many sensational cases, such as those of Anthony Ler, Took Leng How and Ah Long San, and espoused his views on the mandatory death sentence and police entrapment. In this second volume It’s Easy to Cry, this foremost champion of pro bono work moves away from depicting gruesome murders and delves instead into the emotions behind the crimes. He writes about cases where deep and complex emotions are displayed, like the mother who lied and pleaded guilty to save her son. He also shares his thoughts on the many people, including Singapore’s Chief Justices and Attorney-Generals, who have affected him in one way of the other. It is also a searing and honest account of his life, career and friendships — dictated to his wife in 2014 while undergoing kidney dialysis.

Pressure is a Privilege: Lessons I've Learned from Life and the Battle of the Sexes


Billie Jean King - 2008
    But her journey to the "Battle of the Sexes" was no accident. Now, for the first time ever, Billie Jean shares the life lessons that led to her success in that match, in sports, and in the world at large. Published in conjunction with the 35th anniversary of this monumental event, Pressure is a Privilege uses the Billie Jean King / Bobby Riggs match to illustrate what she learned in her early life that brought her to that event and the lessons that she learned from it. Packed with the common-sense lessons by which Billie Jean has lived her remarkable life, as well as words of wisdom and inspirational advice for how you can use these lessons, Pressure is a Privilege is an invaluable tool for any person in any profession who wants to achieve a richer, more fulfilling life.

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race (Exploded Views)


Naben Ruthnum - 2017
    By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley's first novel will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.

Straight Up: My Autobiography


Danny Dyer - 2010
    Proper hard bastards, wannabe villains and cockney wide boys everywhere you went, all looking to make their mark. With trouble at home and more at school, Danny Dyer didn't have many options. He was a rascal, running with a tough crowd, getting himself into scrapes with the Old Bill, on the verge of becoming just another nobody. Until he started to act.It came naturally to him. He landed role after role, working with big stars, making a name for himself. And then came Human Traffic, and his career went into overdrive. Fame opened doors into the best clubs, the best booze and even better drugs. But with the highs came the lows, and as the drinks flowed, the work dried up. Shut out of an industry that didn't understand him, that heard his reputation before bothering with his talent, he had no choice but to turn it around and sort himself out. This is the real story - straight up.Funny, honest, full of swagger, and jammed full of antics and anecdotes, this memoir tears it up proper and delivers on every page.

Ten Days in a Mad-House


Nelly Bly - 1887
    Her memoirs of this event form the basis of "Ten Days in a Mad-House," which forever changed the way the world looks at treatment and housing of the insane.

Stealing Green Mangoes: Two Brothers, Two Fates, One Indian Childhood


Sunil Dutta - 2019
    Before that, he was a biologist at the University of California and a translator of classic Indian poetry. Before that, he was a destitute refugee, one of so many uprooted by the genocidal violence surrounding the Partition of India. Back then, he had a brother. Back then, they were children together, chasing whatever fun and solace they could find in impossible conditions. Sunil looked up to Raju. He admired his strength, his character.Raju took a different path. He was arrested, he fled the law, he became a fugitive. He became a terrorist. Then he became a father—and then a murderer.After being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer later in life, Sunil urgently wanted to understand what choices had led he and his brother down such radically different paths. In Stealing Green Mangoes, Dutta takes us from his family home in Rajasthan to America, to France, to the streets of southeastern Los Angeles, homing in on the questions that tore him and Raju apart: Can you outgrow the madness that made you? Can you make peace with the ghosts of your past?  A memoir with sweeping, spiritual ambitions, Stealing Green Mangoes tells the story of a man who pushed back against the forces that captured his own brother and built a compassionate, meaningful life in a broken world.

Juan Ponce Enrile: A Memoir


Juan Ponce Enrile - 2012
    Aquino III, during which the Philippines metamorphosed from a free-wheeling republic into a brutal dictatorship that eventually gave way to a turbulent return to democratic rule. Sheer longevity, proximity to power and a forceful personality have made Enrile difficult to trivialize, much less ignore. Neither his friends nor his enemies have the power to exaggerate or misrepresent his gifts as well as his faults; they would have to reckon with the man’s personal point of view, here most eloquently told from where he stood and contributed his share to the nation’s narrative.

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space


Amanda Leduc - 2020
    After all, the ogre never gets the princess. And since fairy tales are the foundational myths of our culture, how can a girl with a disability ever think she'll have a happy ending?By examining the ways that fairy tales have shaped our expectations of disability, Disfigured will point the way toward a new world where disability is no longer a punishment or impediment but operates, instead, as a way of centering a protagonist and helping them to cement their own place in a story, and from there, the world. Through the book, Leduc ruminates on the connections we make between fairy tale archetypes—the beautiful princess, the glass slipper, the maiden with long hair lost in the tower—and tries to make sense of them through a twenty-first-century disablist lens. From examinations of disability in tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen through to modern interpretations ranging from Disney to Angela Carter, and the fight for disabled representation in today's media, Leduc connects the fight for disability justice to the growth of modern, magical stories, and argues for increased awareness and acceptance of that which is other—helping us to see and celebrate the magic inherent in different bodies.

John Lennon: In His Own Words


Barry Miles - 1980
    A fascinating insight into the mind of this musical genius.

And The Whippoorwill Sang


Micki Peluso - 2007
     Around the dining room table of her 100 year old farmhouse Micki Peluso's six children along with three of their friends eagerly gulp down a chicken dinner. As soon as the last morsel is ravished, the lot of them is off in different directions. Except for the one whose turn it is to do the dishes. After offering her mother a buck if she’ll do them, with an impish grin, the child rushes out the front door, too excited for a hug, calling out, "Bye Mom," as the door slams shut. For the Peluso’s the nightmare begins. Micki and Butch face the horror every parent fears—awaiting the fate of one of their children. While sitting vigil in the ICU waiting room, Micki traverses the past, as a way of dealing with an inconceivable future. From the bizarre teenage elopement with her high school sweetheart, Butch, in a double wedding with her own mother, to comical family trips across country in an antiquated camper with six kids and a dog, they leave a path of chaos, antics and destruction in their wake. Micki relives the happy times of raising six children while living in a haunted house, as the young parents grow up with their kids. She bravely attempts to be the man of the house while her husband, Butch is working out of town. Hearing strange noises, which all the younger kids are sure is the ghosts, Micki tiptoes down to the cellar, shotgun in hand and nearly shoots an Idaho potato that has fallen from the pantry and thumped down the stairs. Of course her children feel obligated to tell the world. Just when their lives are nearly perfect, tragedy strikes—and the laughter dies. A terrible accident takes place in the placid valley nestled within the Susquehanna Mountains in the town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. On a country lane just blocks from the family’s hundred year old haunted farmhouse, lives are changed forever. In a state of shock, Micki muses through their delightful past to avoid confronting an uncertain future—as the family copes with fear and apprehension. One of her six children is fighting for life in Intensive Care. Both parents are pressured by doctors to disconnect Noelle, their fourteen-year-old daughter. Her beautiful girl, funny and bright, who breathes life into every moment, who does cartwheels in piles of Autumn leaves, who loves to sing and dance down country roads, and above all loves her family with all her soul. How can Micki let this child go? The family embarks upon yet another journey, to the other side of sorrow and grasps the poignant gift of life as they begin. . .to weep. . .to laugh. . .to grieve. . .to dance—and forgive.

The Good, the Mad and the Ugly: The Andy Morrison Story


Andy Morrison - 2011
    The autobiography of the most troubled footballer of modern times.