Book picks similar to
Dalit: The Black Untaouchables of India by V.T. Rajshekar
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The Burning Forest: India's War in Bastar
Nandini Sundar - 2016
The fact that Bastar has some of India's biggest mineral reserves has made the conflict even more intense, and also destroyed the ecology and culture of Bastar.
The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption, and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India
James Astill - 2012
International cricket was still controlled from London, where they played the long, slow game of Test cricket by the old rules. Indians had traditionally underperformed in the sport but the game remained a national passion. Adopting the highly commercial American model of sporting tournaments, and throwing scantily clad western cheerleaders into the mix, Modi gave himself three months to succeed. And succeed he did--dazzlingly--before he and his league crashed to earth amid astonishing scandal and corruption.The emergence of the IPL is a remarkable tale. Cricket is at the heart of the miracle that is modern India. As a business, it represents everything that is most dynamic and entrepreneurial about the country's economic boom, including the industrious and aspiring middle-class consumers who are driving it. The IPL also reveals, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, the corrupt, back-scratching, and nepotistic way in which India is run.A truly original work by a brilliant journalist, The Great Tamasha* makes the complexity of modern India--its aspiration and optimism straining against tradition and corruption--accessible like no other book has.*Tamasha: a Hindi world meaning "a spectacle."
The Last P.O.W. (Kindle Single)
Mike Chinoy - 2014
For nearly two months, he was held by North Korea’s fearsome security services, subjected to intensive interrogation, and repeatedly warned that if he did not confess his “crimes,” he might never be allowed to return home. In visiting the North, Newman was returning for a final glimpse of the country where he served a half century earlier. Perhaps naively- and in sharp contrast to America’s former enemies Japan, Germany, and Vietnam - he did not realize that for the North Koreans, the war had never ended. His role in 1953 as a U.S. military adviser to the “Kuwol Comrades”-- anti-communist Korean guerrillas who fought behind North Korean lines -- convinced a paranoid North Korean regime that despite his age, his heart condition, and the passage of time, Newman was a dangerous “enemy” agent. "The Last POW" is the exclusive account of Newman’s ordeal -- how the North Koreans tried, without success, to break his will; his interactions with his sinister interrogator and the other North Koreans involved in his detention; the "confession" he was forced to broadcast, and how he tried to signal he was being coerced. While Merrill was detained in Pyongyang, his family -- his wife Lee, living in a retirement home in Palo Alto, and his son and daughter-in-law in Pasadena -- were frantically trying to determine what had happened to him and what they could do to secure his freedom. Newman’s detention became a symbol of the seemingly irreconcilable differences that keep North Korea and the U.S. in a permanent state of tension, and revealed the inner workings of the security apparatus of one of the world’s most totalitarian states. Eventually, his case would involve the State Department, the international news media, eccentric former basketball player Dennis Rodman, and possibly North Korean leader Kim Jong Un himself. His story serves as a warning against underestimating the lengths to which a paranoid and secretive regime will go to defend what it perceives as a threat to its security or reputation. But it is also an inspiring tale of an ordinary American family’s courage and resilience in a situation as frightening as it was bizarre. Mike Chinoy is a Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. He previously spent 24 years as a foreign correspondent for CNN, serving as Bureau Chief in Beijing and Hong Kong, and as Senior Asia Correspondent.. He is the author of "Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis," and "China Live: People Power and the Television Revolution." He his visited North Korea 17 times. Cover design by Evan Twohy.
Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America
John McWhorter - 2005
Winning the Race examines the roots of the serious problems facing black Americans today—poverty, drugs, and high incarceration rates—and contends that none of the commonly accepted reasons can explain the decline of black communities since the end of segregation in the 1960s. Instead, McWhorter posits that a sense of victimhood and alienation that came to the fore during the civil rights era has persisted to the present day in black culture, even though most blacks today have never experienced the racism of the segregation era.McWhorter traces the effects of this disempowering conception of black identity, from the validation of living permanently on welfare to gansta rap’s glorification of irresponsibility and violence as a means of “protest.” He discusses particularly specious claims of racism, attacks the destructive posturing of black leaders and the “hip-hop academics,” and laments that a successful black person must be faced with charges of “acting white.” While acknowledging that racism still exists in America today, McWhorter argues that both blacks and whites must move past blaming racism for every challenge blacks face, and outlines the steps necessary for improving the future of black America.
Freedom Summer
Doug McAdam - 1988
Within ten days, three of them were murdered; by the summer's end, another had died and hundreds more had endured bombings, beatings, and arrests. Less dramatically, but no less significantly, the volunteers encountered a "liberating" exposure to new lifestyles, new political ideologies, and a radically new perspective on America and on themselves. Films such as Mississippi Burning have attempted to document this episode in the civil rights era, but Doug McAdam offers the first book to gauge the impact of Freedom Summer on the project volunteers and the period we now call "the turbulent sixties." Tracking down hundreds of the original project applicants, and combining hard data with a wealth of personal recollections, he has produced a riveting portrait of the people, the events, and the era. McAdam discovered that during Freedom Summer, the volunteers' encounters with white supremacist violence and their experiences with interracial relationships, communal living, and a more open sexuality led many of them to "climb aboard a political and cultural wave just as it was forming and beginning to wash forward." Many became activists in subsequent protests--including the antiwar movement and the feminist movement--and, most significantly, many of them have remained activists to this day. Brimming with the reminiscences of the Freedom Summer veterans, the book captures the varied motives that compelled them to make the journey south, the terror that came with the explosions of violence, the camaraderie and conflicts they experienced among themselves, and their assorted feelings about the lessons they learned.
My Name is Radha: The Essential Manto
Saadat Hasan Manto - 2015
But neither Partition nor prostitution gave birth to the genius of Saadat Hasan Manto. They only furnished him with an occasion to reveal the truth of the human condition.My Name Is Radha is a path-breaking selection of stories which delves deep into Manto’s creative world. In this singular collection, the focus rests on Manto the writer. It does not draft him into being Manto the commentator. Muhammad Umar Memon’s inspired choice of Manto’s best-known stories, along with those less talked about, and his precise and elegant translation showcase an astonishing writer being true to his calling.
Days of Longing
Nirmal Verma - 1964
The professional meeting explodes into an intense, passionate relationship. Prague in winter is a beautiful and moody setting to the feverish love affair. The complicated and inevitably short-lived romance is poignant and deeply moving in its telling by the master of the modern Hindi novel, Nirmal Verma.This book is translation of original novel in Hindi, called Ve Din.
India's China Challenge: A Journey through China's Rise and What It Means for India
Ananth Krishnan - 2020
In the years that followed, he had a ringside view of the country's remarkable transformation. He reported from Beijing for a decade, for the India Today and The Hindu. This gave him a privileged opportunity that few Indians have had - to travel the length and breadth of the country, beyond the glitzy skyscrapers of Shanghai and the grand avenues of Beijing that greet most tourists, to the heart of China's rise. This book is Krishnan's attempt at unpacking India's China challenge, which is four-fold: the political challenge of dealing with a one-party state that is looking to increasingly shape global institutions; the military challenge of managing an unresolved border; the economic challenge of both learning from China's remarkable and unique growth story and building a closer relationship; and the conceptual challenge of changing how we think about and engage with our most important neighbour. India's China Challenge tells the story of a complex political relationship, and how China - and its leading opinion-makers - view India. It looks at the economic dimensions and cultural connect, and the internal political and social transformations in China that continue to shape both the country's future and its relations with India.
MiddlePassages: Poetry
Edward Kamau Brathwaite - 1992
With his other 'shorter' collections Black + Blues and Third World Poems, Middle Passages creates a kind of chisel which may well lead us into a projected third trilogy. Here is a political angle to Brathwaite's Caribbean & New World quest, with new notes of protest and lament. It marks a Sisyphean stage of Third World history in which things fall apart and everyone's achievements come tumbling back down upon their heads and into their hearts, like the great stone which King Sisyphus was condemned to keep heaving back up the same hill in hell - a postmodernist implosion already signalled by Baldwin, Patterson, Soyinka and Achebe and more negatively by V.S. Naipaul; but given a new dimension here by Brathwaite's rhythmical and 'video' affirmations. And so Middle Passages includes poems for those modern heroes who are the pegs by which the mountain must be climbed again: Maroon resistance, the poets Nicolas Guillen, the Cuban revolutionary, and Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill; the great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith); and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney and Nelson Mandela.
1000 Days on the River Kwai: The Secret Diary of a British Camp Commandant
Cary Owtram - 2017
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson l Summary & Study Guide
BookRags - 2013
This study guide includes the following sections: Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, Quotes, and Topics for Discussion.
Dreads
Francesco Mastalia - 1999
According to ancient Hindu beliefs, dreads signified a singleminded pursuit of the spiritual. Devotion to God displaced vanity, and hair was left to its own devices.Dreads captures this organic explosion of hair in all its beautiful, subversive glory. One hundred duotone portraits present dread-heads from around the world, in all walks of life. Interviewed on location by the photographers, jatta-wearers wax philosophic about the integrity of their hair, and every stunning image confirms their choice. Alice Walker puts words to pictures, offering lyrical ruminations about her decision to let her own mane mat.
#Tatastories: 40 Timeless Tales to Inspire You
Harish Bhat - 2021
Dancing across this long arc of time are thousands of beautiful, astonishing stories, many of which can inspire and provoke us, even move us to meaningful action in our own lives.A diamond twice as large as the famous Kohinoor pledged to survive a financial crisis; a meeting with a ‘relatively unknown young monk’ who later went on to be known as Swami Vivekananda; the fascinating story of the first-ever Indian team at the Olympics; the making of India’s first commercial airline and first indigenous car; how ‘OK TATA’ made its way to the backs of millions of trucks on Indian highways; a famous race that was both lost and won; andmany more.#TataStories is a collection of littleknown tales of individuals, events and places from the Tata Group that have shaped the India we live in today.
Shooting Water: A Memoir of Second Chances, Family, and Filmmaking
Devyani Saltzman - 2005
This cross-cultural memoir chronicles her life-changing experiences in India and Sri Lanka, the struggle to produce the controversial Oscar®-nominated film, and the emergence of a deeper understanding between mother and daughter.This trade paperback edition features a reading group guide that includes an interview with the author and discussion questions. 16 black-and-white photos, maps.