Prakash Shenoy's Diary

When the hubristic, newly elected US president boasts of America's invulnerability to foreign attack, the sense of imminent calamity is overwhelming. The title invokes 9/11, but the novel is set 60 years ago. The plot against America isn't Islamic but homegrown (with a little assistance from Germany). And instead of reconstructing real historical events, as David Hare does in Stuff Happens, Philip Roth offers something bolder: a reconstruction of imagined events, a "what if...?" that reads like a "what really happened". Just suppose...that the air hero Charles Lindbergh, the man who made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, who earned huge sympathy when his baby son was kidnapped and murdered five years later, who called Hitler "a great man" and was decorated by order of the Führer for his services to the Reich, just suppose that he'd taken up Republican invitations to run for president in November 1940, and milked the ...

पाकिस्तानमध्ये लष्कर-राजकारणी आणि दहशतवादी संघटनांच्या घुसळणीतून काय घडत आहे, हे जाणून घेणे भारतासाठी अत्यावश्यक ठरते. मात्र इस्लाम, त्यांचा अर्थ लावणारे घटक, त्यांच्या परस्परांत टकरा, आंतरराष्ट्रीय पवित्र्यांचे परिणाम अशा प्रवाहांचीही नीट माहिती आपल्याकडे करून घेतली जात नाही. मुख्य धाराच नीट माहीत नाहीत, मग बारीकसारीक तपशील कोण पाहणार? मात्र पाकव्याप्त काश्मीरचा अफगाण सीमाप्रदेश, त्याचे सात विभाग, तिथला भूगोल, टोळ्या, आर्थिक-भौतिक मागासलेपण-त्यातून पाय रोवण्यास दहशतवाद्यांना अनुकूल भूमी याची विलक्षण तपशिलात जाऊन माहिती पाकिस्तानी पत्रकार इम्तियाज गुल यांनी गोळा केली. स्वत:चा जीव अनेकदा धोक्यात घालून पायी हिंडणे, भेटीगाठी, एखादा धागा पकडून त्या संघटनेच्या नेत्याला भेटणे, मिळालेली माहिती विवेकाने तपासणे, त्याआधारे आणखी तपशील असा हा विस्मयकारी प्रवास आहे. त्याचेच प्रत्यंतर रेखा देशपांडे अनुवादित ‘अल कायदाचे धागेदोरे’ हे पुस्तक वाचताना येतो. अल कायदा, तालिबान वहाबी इस्लाम, दहशतवाद, आयएसआय... आदी शब्दमालिका भारतात उच्चारली म्हणजे, अशिक्षित सामान्य जनांपासून वर्तमानपत्रांचे...

Every country has its reallife version of the fictional mafioso Vito Corleone. Dawood Hasan Ibrahim Kaskar is not as charismatic as Mario Puzo’s enduring creation, but he does display a Corleone-esque tendency to vapourise all his enemies. Ibrahim has featured in so many movies that it is safe to attribute a sub-genre to him. S Hussain Zaidi’s new book Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia already has a cinematic connection: ten of its 63 chapters will be used in the screenplay of the forthcoming Sanjay Gupta movie Shootout at Wadala, about the murder in 1982 of Manya Surve, who reportedly killed Ibrahim’s brother Subir Kaskar. “Dawood was always known to be unforgiving,” Zaidi writes about the mobster, who ordered the hit. “He decided to avenge his brother’s killing and eliminate each and every person involved in the murder. He had no personal enmity with Manya… But Manya will have to pay for this, Dawood swore.” Replace Manya’s name with any other and Ibra...

Gandhi's nonviolent struggles in South Africa and India had already brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation, and controversy that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself. Although accepting of his status as a great innovator in the struggle against racism, violence, and, just then, colonialism, Gandhi feared that enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding. He says that he was after truth rooted in devotion to God and attributed the turning points, successes, and challenges in his life to the will of God. His attempts to get closer to this divine power led him to seek purity through simple living, dietary practices (he called himself a fruitarian), celibacy, and ahimsa, a life without violence. It is in this sense that he calls his book The Story of My Experiments with Truth, offering it also as a reference for those who would follow in his footsteps. A reader ex...

Of the more than one hundred books that H. G. Wells published in his lifetime, this is one of the most ambitious. Spanning the origins of the Earth to the outcome of World War I, A Short History of the World is an engrossing account of the evolution of life and the development of the human race. Wells brings his monumental learning and penetrating historical insight to bear on the Neolithic era, the rise of Judaism, the Golden Age of Athens, the life of Christ, the rise of Islam, the discovery of America, the Industrial Revolution, and a host of other subjects. Breathtaking in scope, this thought-provoking masterwork remains one of the most readable and rewarding of its kind. If you have ever wondered about how history hangs together, then this is the book for you. From the dawn of civilization to the modern era, Wells takes you along the journey of civilization (and pre-civilization -- the first few chapters of the book cover geology and evolution). This tome, and if e...

From childhood I was quite curious to know more about the history of the Vijayanagara empire. Our high-school text-books on history barely touched upon the rise and the fall of this great empire that ruled over almost all of southern India for about three centuries beginning in the 14th century. We picked up Burton Stein's “The New Cambridge History of India: Vijayanagara” mainly because at about 150 pages it looked like a more manageable read than the other such books. It was also far more recent than the other books and therefore had a much better chance of incorporating the findings from recent research into this aspect of Indian history. The book turned out to be a serious study of the history of the Vijayanagara empire as well as a commentary on the published literature on this topic. It seems therefore to be better suited for students of history than the general public and it does get dull at times. That does not mean that it does not have fascinating informat...

Pirate Latitudes is an action adventure novel written by Michael Crichton. The book was published posthumously by HarperCollins on November 24, 2009. It is an adventure story concerning piracy in Jamaica in the 17th century. The novel stars the fictional privateer Captain Charles Hunter who, together with the governor of Jamaica, plots to raid a Spanish galleon for its treasure. Johnathan Burnham's review states that it is "thoroughly researched...packed through with great detail about navigation and how pirates operated, and links between the New World and the Caribbean and Spain.” Michael Crichton's "Pirate Latitudes" is everything you're looking for in a pirate adventure. It doesn't necessarily do anything new with the genre, but it will satisfy those who found the popular "Pirates of the Caribbean" films too over-the-top and cartoony. This (relatively short) novel tells the story of pirate (he prefers "privateer") Ch...