REVOLUTION SONG A Story of American Freedom By Russell Shorto - Book Review

“There is properly no history, only biography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Russell Shorto, in his new book “Revolution Song,” seems to be of similar mind. He writes about six people, all of whom lived in the Revolutionary era, but he does not roll them up into a single narrative or use their lives to bolster an overarching thesis.

Instead, he artfully weaves their stories together and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. “I have tried not to preach or even teach,” Shorto writes in the preface — and it proves a decidedly refreshing approach.

Shorto has an eye for intriguing subjects (his previous books include “Amsterdam,” “Descartes’ Bones” and “The Island at the Center of the World”), and this book is no exception.

The Seneca chief Cornplanter (or Kayethwahkeh in Seneca) was a fine looking, philosophically minded man who was also, in Shorto’s words, “something of a killing machine.”

Allied with England during the Revolution, Cornplanter and his warriors slaughtered patriot soldiers and civilians, even children. In retaliation, George Washington sent an invasion force that destroyed crops and leveled village upon village, killing and scalping along the way.

The war devastated the Senecas, and afterward Cornplanter counseled accommodation, urging his people to learn English and know something of white ways. But as the Senecas lost more territory, they grew increasingly hostile to white culture.

A message came to Cornplanter from the Creator, telling him to “remove from his house and sight every article of the workmanship or invention of the white man.” He destroyed mementos, including a sword that had been a gift from Washington, and gradually withdrew from the wider world.

Shorto concludes with the optimistic side of the Creator’s message, describing ancestral lands and ancient ways that Cornplanter, having thrown off white culture, could dream of once more. But the conclusion to Cornplanter’s story is actually very sad.

Although the United States government guaranteed in 1794 that the Seneca grant where Cornplanter was buried would never be taken, in 1964 it was. The Army Corps of Engineers moved his remains and those of hundreds of Senecas buried near him in order to construct a dam on the Allegheny River.

Another of Shorto’s subjects is Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, a dark-haired beauty who wrote a delightfully scandalous memoir. Some scholars have thought it a forgery, but Shorto argues that it is not, and without doubt it is a good read.

Coghlan’s father, a British officer assigned to the United States during the Revolution, forced her at age 14 to marry the British lieutenant John Coghlan, probably to put an end to her dalliance with Aaron Burr. She detested her husband, ran away and availed herself of an English lord, whereupon her father sent her to a nunnery. After she escaped, he disowned her.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com

An American Tragedy By Ta-Nehisi Coates

There have always been black presidents of the United States. That’s true whether we’re talking about the work of the historian J. A. Rogers, who in 1965 published “The Five Negro Presidents: According to What White People Said They Were”;

or whether we mean the work of our finest comedians like Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle, whose sketches imagining a black president satirized not so much the man himself as the racism that had prevented the dream of one.

Then there’s the actor Morgan Freeman, who has portrayed not just the president but God with that lush voice of his. He maketh all things possible.

But even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as “black” could not prepare us for the election of America’s first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. As Ta-Nehisi Coates charts over and over again in the essays found in “We Were Eight Years in Power,” the price of that ticket has been a steady and at times surprising backlash, resulting in what Coates ultimately and provocatively calls “America’s first white president” in Donald Trump.

If “the improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic,” now Coates means to give us what he calls “an American tragedy.” His account presides over not just a change in the nation but changing notions of citizenry, legitimacy and even hope. With some quarters seeing the 2008 election less as a promise than as a threat, Obama’s achievement proves to be both a milestone and a millstone.

The same might be said of Coates’s ascension as an important critic, if not the important critic, of our time. To his credit, Coates has sidestepped the old “one-at-a-time” trap used to pit black geniuses against one another, as well as the ever-present pressure to be the go-to expert on blackness after the runaway success of his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me.”

His reach has proved impressive: Coates, the son of a former Black Panther, went on to reinvent the comic book Black Panther, making him the envy of “blerds” everywhere.

But it is James Baldwin more than anyone who appears as a lodestone here. Coates even moved for a time to France, as Baldwin did, and Coates’s expatriate distance only sharpened his view of the goings-on at home. 

Of Baldwin, Coates writes powerfully: “Baldwin’s beauty — like all real beauty — is not style apart from substance but indivisible from it. It is not the icing on the cake but the eggs within it, giving it texture, color and shape.”

“Eight Years” could have settled for being the obligatory miscellany that too often follows a writer’s masterpiece; instead, the book provides a master class on the essay form. 

Structured as a call and response between eight of his most significant articles and briefer, more personal essays arranged by year, Coates gives us something between a mixtape and a Künstlerroman, demonstrating how he came to dominate the nonfiction genre.

Even without the framing of the lively if clipped “this is what I was doing that year” portions, we can see Coates’s growing power and prowess from the progression of the pieces themselves. 

Picking up steam with “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” from February 2012, Coates is in full command by the time we reach “Fear of a Black President,” an essay that captures the Obama that many are nostalgic for and others continue to rage against.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World - Book Review

Understanding our world through the stories of Joseph Conrad

Us versus them; you are with us or against us; black or white — as communication across lines break down, is the inability to understand each other pushing us to the brink?

Amid an existential crisis, comes this remarkable retelling of Joseph Conrad’s life and work and its resonance with the present dysfunctional world by Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff.

In 1975, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave a public lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The novella, he said, “projected the image of Africa as the ‘other world’, the antithesis of Europe, and therefore of civilisation...” Calling Conrad, a “bloody racist,” Achebe found the book “rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans.”

Jasanoff mentions Achebe, as also Barack Obama’s retort when asked by a friend why he was reading “this racist tract.” It’s because, he said, “the book teaches me things... About White people... A particular way of looking at the world.”

Read the original book review on: The Hindu

Democracy’s XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story - Book Review

A journalist sums up the evolution of Indian cricket from diffidence to dominance through a hand-picked team straddling different eras

Cricket, like any team sport, lends itself to lists. For connoisseurs, drawing up an all-time eleven is an exercise seasoned with nostalgia and strong views. Television journalist Rajdeep Sardesai has taken that initiative a step further in his book Democracy’s XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story.

A news-scribe anchored to political reportage, Sardesai’s previous book was 2014: The Election That Changed India. 

Yet, as evident in his tweets, Sardesai is also fond of philosophical musings, old Hindi songs and cricket. His links to the willow-game mixes genetics — his late father Dilip Sardesai was a former India cricketer — with a fan’s obsession for the game. 

Sardesai Junior has played too and he has a profile page on Cricinfo with the numbers: seven matches for Oxford University in 1987, yielding 222 runs averaging 27.75. Candidly, Sardesai admits that he finally preferred the ‘less strenuous world of journalism’.

Rewarding merit

Democracy’s XI isn’t entirely based on pure-performance and staggering statistics, though legends like Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar are intrinsic to the 371-page tome. Sardesai’s eleven is essentially a socio-anthropological dive into different eras, varied geographies and fluctuating economic conditions that threw up players, who reflected a nation on the move, its democratic credentials largely evinced through cricket. 

It is a subjective list entirely driven by Sardesai’s desire to show the game’s far-flung roots and it being a barometer for rewarding merit. “Seventy years after Indian Independence, we could well argue that cricket is one of the few largely meritocratic activities,” he writes.

The author’s eleven features Dilip Sardesai, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, Bishan Singh Bedi, Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Mohammad Azharuddin, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Virat Kohli.

Since nepotism is an oft-used word these days, there could be the odd query on why Sardesai’s father is on the list, but there is no denying that Sardesai Senior was a fine player and more importantly as a cricketer hailing from Margao, he proved that there is more to Goa than just football. 

In that sense, Dilip Sardesai fits into the book, and additionally his tale reveals the amateur spirit around cricket in the 1960s and the obvious lack of money, far removed from the crores that garland Kohli and company.

In his introduction, Sardesai describes his book as an effort to paint “anecdotal mini-portraits of eleven cricketers who in their own unique way represent the universal and pluralistic appeal of the sport.” 

Sardesai has stuck to that benchmark and it helps that being a journalist with an experience of close to three decades, he has at varying points interacted with these players. The guard is lowered and cricketers open up to him and it makes for a good read.

Read the original article on: The Hindu

Political Violence in Ancient India by Rudrangshu Mukherjee - Book Review

A layered argument on kingship, royal power and its use of violence also includes voices who critiqued the state

Indian historiography is not especially rich in the history of idea. This is even more true for the history of India’s ancient past than for more recent epochs. 

Thus Upinder Singh’s new book, intended as a foray into the history of political ideas in ancient India, is a pioneering attempt. 

It seeks to puncture the myth perpetrated by leaders like Gandhi and Nehru in their various writings that non-violence was embedded in Indian tradition and culture.

Singh’s book is also an essay to analyse political processes that provided the context for an enduring and rich discourse on political violence between 600 BCE and 600 CE. 

She draws on a corpus of texts — inscriptions, literary and discursive texts — to illuminate and substantiate her arguments. The result is a book with a layered and complex argument which will make readers rethink their views about ancient India, its political praxis and the project to theorise that praxis.

Shattering myths

A large degree of force and coercion — read violence — is embedded in the functioning of any State, be it a kingdom or a republic. 

Between 600 BCE and 200 BCE, as kingdoms and empires emerged in parts of India, the necessary presence of force in a state was recognised, but these texts also discussed how this necessity could be measured, justified and mitigated. 

Singh emphasises that in these discussions there was one consistent voice that championed non-violence as a way of life for a king and other lesser human beings. This was, of course, the voice of Ashoka. 

But even that remarkable monarch, as Singh points out, warned the forest people that violence could be used against them; he refused to abolish capital punishment; and did not disband his army even after his epiphany following the conquest of Kalinga.

During the period 200 BCE to 300 CE, continuities from the previous period notwithstanding, there was a greater engagement with the idea of royal power, and kingship and governance came to be discussed from a variety of perspectives. 

An important element in these new discussions was ‘a new equation of the king with the religious domain’ as was noticeable in coins and inscriptions. But this growing association only facilitated the justification and the ‘masking’ of the violence embedded in kingship and the exercise of royal power.

The middle of the first millennium saw the discourse on political violence become more nuanced. One view held that for the survival and the furthering of royal power, force was necessary. Singh calls this the artha view. Another argued that force was required to secure the king’s glory and fame. 

This is the dharma view. There existed in some texts intermediate views that advocate greater caution and sensitivity towards political violence. 

Though the discourse on political violence was largely tilted in favour of justifying it, Singh is careful to draw out elements of doubt and dissent — and indeed of critique — that remained and refused to be silenced.

Read the Original article on: The Hindu

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon - Book Review

'Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.'

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. 

He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. 

Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. Routine, order and predictability shelter him from the messy, wider world. 

Then, at fifteen, Christopher's carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbor's dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing.

Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer and turns to his favorite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. 

But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths and ultimately brings him face to face with the dissolution of his parents' marriage.  

Read the original book review on: GoodReads

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan - Book Review

A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. 

Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. 

Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence’s response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite. 

Read the original book review on: Good Reads

Elmet by Fiona Mozley - Book Review

This dark debut about a family living on the outskirts of society is an impressive slice of contemporary noir steeped in Yorkshire legend Fiona Mozley’s Man Booker-longlisted debut is an elemental, contemporary rural noir steeped in the literature and legend of the Yorkshire landscape and its medieval history. 

Doncaster is the nearest orienting location, the geographic heart of the ancient kingdom from which the novel takes its name and on which Ted Hughes based the Remains of Elmet cycle of poems. 

Robyn Hode and his people’s uprising nourish the narrative. As Mozley’s narrator Daniel has it: “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.”

Daniel and his sister Cathy live in a house they and their Daddy have built with their bare hands near the main East Coast rail line. Daddy’s name is John, but for Daniel and Cathy he is only ever Daddy. 

The contrast between this gentlest of paternal diminutives and the man himself – a bare-knuckle boxer of epic stature – casts into sharp relief the primal tenderness binding the three when the children wash and cut their father’s hair or share with him roll-ups and cider. Outsiders take a harsher view: 

“Others saw reciprocity and debts, imagined threats founded in nothing more than his physical presence.” That presence is excessive: compared with the bailiffs and fighters he comes up against, “Daddy was gargantuan. 

Each of his arms was as thick as two of theirs. His fists were near the size of their heads. Each of them could have sat curled up inside his ribcage like a foetus.”

Daddy’s “old-time morality” is essentially pre-Norman. He has no truck with documents or deeds, and has built his home on land he does not own. He makes sure to hunt humanely: the family shoot game with bow and arrow. 

Daddy has killed men, and speaks honestly with his children about this. His body, his strength and his wits are his truest possessions. He is direct in his dealings with others but the suspicion with which he is treated as a result has placed him outside society: “He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. 

The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it.” This outsider status sets the family against venal landowners and employers and their cowardly lackeys, centred around the vulpine Price family who will prove their nemesis. The revelation of an occult shared history arcs the narrative towards tragedy.

The original article is published on: The Guardian

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 – review

In 2015 a BBC2 documentary, Children of the Gaza War, brought a flurry of complaints. One of the Palestinian children interviewed said in Arabic that “the Jews” are killing Palestinians. 

However, the English subtitles translated this as “Israel is massacring us”. Many Jewish and Israel-supporting viewers accused the BBC of intentionally downplaying Palestinian antisemitism. 

The documentary’s maker, Lyse Doucet, stood by the subtitle, saying: “We talked to people in Gaza, we talked to translators. When [the children] say ‘Jews’, they mean ‘Israelis’. We felt it was a better translation of it.” Israel has existed around Gaza for nearly 70 years and children there are still calling their Israeli neighbours Jews.

Ian Black opens his excellent new history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Enemies and Neighbours, with a note on terminology titled Language Matters. He points out that in colloquial Arabic used by the Palestinians, Israelis are still often called “Yahud” – Jews. On the other hand, while until 1948, the year of Israel’s establishment, the term “Palestinians” usually referred to all inhabitants of Palestine, including Jews, it only gradually came to be used to describe one side in the conflict. 

Only in recent decades have Israelis started to differentiate their next-door neighbours from the rest of the neighbourhood, calling them “Palestinians” instead of the more amorphous “Arabs”. Words matter. They are the building blocks of the contradicting narratives each side has continued telling themselves, and the world.

Palestinian-Israeli writer Odeh Bisharat is quoted: “If there is no shared narrative of the past, then let us at least write one of the future.” But as Enemies and Neighbours expertly describes, Israelis and Palestinians have spent the last century escaping each other’s narratives and are still doing nothing to write a new one.

A veteran reporter and former Guardian Middle East editor, Black spent decades immersed in both Israeli and Palestinian societies, fluently speaking their languages. He notes how the Hebrew and Arabic used by the warring communities, as well as their culture and daily lives, have been affected and formed by the conflict. 

How the Jews, who began to arrive in the late 19th century, or “return” as they would have it, gradually coalesced into a new Israeli society. And how the Arabs living in Palestine began to define themselves as a distinct national group, in a large part as a reaction to the Zionist arrival and entrenchment.

The original article is published on: The Guardian

Book Review - FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD

Add Louise Erdrich (LaRose, The Round House) to the growing list of literary authors to dabble in dystopian fiction. Her latest work, Future Home of the Living God, imagines a frightening, not-too-distant time, made all the more terrifying by its plausibility. 

The U.S. Congress has expanded a set of policies that began as the Patriot Act so that pregnant women can be “sequestered in hospitals in order to give birth under controlled circumstances.”

The reason for this expansion is not made immediately clear, but it becomes apparent through the story of 26-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, “the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals.” Born on an Ojibwe reservation, Cedar has never known her biological parents. 

As the novel opens, it’s been a year since Cedar’s birth mother sent her a letter asking if they could meet. Cedar ignored the request. But now that Cedar is four months pregnant, her perspective has changed, and she decides to meet her birth parents. But that’s not all that has changed.

A biological disaster has occurred, “evolution has reversed,” and pregnant women are sent to detention centers so they can be monitored. Cedar is of particular interest to authorities, as they believe she is carrying one of the few “normal” babies not suffering from abnormalities.

Read the Original article on: https://bookpage.com/