The Orchid Thief of the title is John Laroche: a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. Susan Orlean wrote about him for...
This nearly 500 paged book stuffed with information and concepts and history is not going to be easy to review comprehensively. This review will just highlight a few key ideas and topics that rise to the forefront of my mind...
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. This memorable sentence is the start of Arundhati Roy’s wonderful The God of Small Things, and anyone who has read it knows or has assumed the novel contains the broad outlines of...
I was not familiar with the term ‘slow journalism’ which, per a search, has multiple definitions (my favorite is “unbreaking news”). Words that fit Radhika Iyengar’s Fire on the Ganges include “storytelling” and “taking time” – to listen, to observe,...
Many of us have had the experience of surgery in a hospital, either for ourselves or people around us. The routine may be familiar if fraught: nurses briskly entering and leaving, vital signs checked at apparently random intervals, those bright...
This is not one of Quindlen’s lovely novels, but a non-fiction where she writes her thoughts on life and life’s lessons. It was a highly enjoyable read because I relish her writing voice, its clarity and charm, and also enjoyed...
I could not wait to read this book. Rushdie has written 22 books in his 77 or 78 years of life, and of those, only 2 have been non-fiction – Joseph Anton, and now Knife. These are the only 2 books...
Autofiction — lightly anonymized fiction based on the author’s own life experience — has been very popular lately, with a host of young writers exploring that genre. As a smattering of examples reviewed in this blog, there’s Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie...
The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 during President Obamas last year in office after 8 scandal-free years (we can only marvel, but sadly). To honour David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect who designed the...
In the early 2000s, Stephanie Land found herself the single mother of a small child, out of a broken relationship with the child’s father, with a high school education, and no job skills. She needed to make a living for...
~ The Truths we Hold: An American Journey, by Kamala Harris ~ Penguin Random House, 2019 This biography was published in 2019, so this book is the story of Harris’ childhood and career till then: as district attorney for San...
~ Amader Shantiniketan, by Shivani ~ Vintage, 2023 This review was first published in Parabaas, and is reproduced here with permission. Shivani’s Amader Shantiniketan is one of those books where the foreword is almost as interesting as the book itself....
In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations...
Too often, inventors are painted as heroic, with their faults glossed over in our accepted narrative. Most are damaged in a significant way, usually from early in their lives. […] By the time they grew to be adults, many were...
Say the word ‘Rastafarian’, and many people will think of Bob Marley and reggae. Beyond the catchy, unmistakeable rhythm of the songs, few people in America, including myself, know much about the Rastafari religion. Safiya Sinclair’s arresting new memoir, How...
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