The Penguin 1857 Reader by Pramod K. Nayar 1857 was a defining moment in the history of the British Empire. As native troops in India -rebelled- against their colonial masters and were joined by a large number of local chiefs, civilians and princes, the Empire almost lost its most prized territory. A hundred and fifty years later, scholars, academics and historians still argue about the exact nature of the uprising and the appropriate nomenclature for it: the First War of Independence, the Great Indian Mutiny, the Sepoy Rebellion. Debates still rage over its causes. Did it really originate from a dispute over greased cartridges. Was it premeditated.
The Penguin 1857 Reader depicts the historic event from various perspectives: English, Indian, European and American. Through a selection of documents of the time, it provides glimpses into the actions across northern India, maps the contours of dissent against the Raj and explores the immediate responses to the upheaval in India and outside. Included here are numerous newspaper and magazine accounts in leading English and American papers, chronicles of British and Indian men and women who witnessed the turmoil, intelligence reports and narratives of soldiers, the British administration?s responses, the opinions of Karl Marx, Lord Macaulay and Mark Twain, British views on the Rani of Jhansi and Nana Saheb, and Mirza Ghalib?s moving narration in his diaries and the historic trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar.
It is 1494 when the ruler of Ferghana dies in an extraordinary accident. His only son, twelve-year-old Babur, faces a seemingly impossible challenge. Young Babur is determined to live up to the example of his great ancestor, Tamburlaine - Timur the Warrior - whose conquests transformed the face of the earth from Delhi to the Mediterranean, from wealthy Persia to the wildernesses along the Volga. But he is dangerously young to inherit a kingdom.
Before Babur can summon enough warlords to declare him the rightful king of Ferghana, plots against his crown, even his life, are hatching. And soon, as his obsession with Timur's legacy and the fabled city of Samarkand grows, and Babur becomes a man, he will discover that even the bravest and most fearless leader can be betrayed. With the wisest of advisers and most courageous of warriors by his side, Babur can achieve a great destiny and found an empire in India, but every step of his journey will be fraught with danger, in a world of tribal rivalries, rampaging armies and ruthlessly ambitious enemies.
Tilt : A Skewed History Of The Tower Of Pisa by Nicholas Shrady In the tradition of the bestselling Brunelleschi's Dome this acclaimed book by architectural critic Nicholas Shrady takes a look from every angle at one of the most storied and recognizable structures in the world. The Tower of Pisa has withstood gravity, war, earthquakes and an onslaught of tourists for hundreds of years. But Shrady shows us much more than a structure that has defied the odds. Boasting a revolutionary design at its construction the tower has born witness to a remarkable history from its celebration by Romantics like Lord Byron to the corrective surgery at the hands of Mussolini that almost ruined it. Hugely entertaining and informative Tilt is a triumph worthy of its imperfect yet enduring subject.Read More...Hide Pages: 161
Samru the Fearless Warrior by Jaipal Singh This novel is woven around the astonishing life of Samru Begum. It is set in the latter half of eighteenth century Delhi and its environs. The Mughal empire had been reduced to impotence by repeated attacks from its adversaries. Its capital was rapidly decaying. Even the police force was hand in glove with the criminals.
It was in this slezsy enviornment that a courtesan of humble origin rose from a salon of dancing girls in Delhi, to the important position of the chief of a principality of North India with a corps of troops of herown, which she commanded effectively.Read More...Hide Pages: 189
Nazism and War by Richard Bessel In Nazism and War, Richard Bessel, one of the preeminent authorities on the social and political history of modern Germany, demonstrates how racial hatred was the driving force behind?and not a by-product of-Nazism. War was the anvil on which Hitler's worldview was forged; to him, war was "the most memorable period of my life,"and "all the past fell away into oblivion."German National Socialism was born in war, emerging triumphant over a country deeply scarred by defeat and eager to reclaim its greatness and to punish those who had usurped it. As a political philosophy, Nazism glorified struggle and conflict, viewing them as the purpose of a nation and a measure of its overall condition. As a political movement and state system, Nazism made its ideology real, plunging the European continent into a war of annihilation and a sea of blood. Nazism-inseparable from war- destroyed the old Europe, and thus helped to create the world in which we live.
Incisive, authoritative, and immensely readable, this is an incendiary and forcefully argued work of scholarship that will rank with the most influential historical analyses of our time.Read More...Hide Pages: 220
Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire by Ambrish Satwik In Perenium Ambarish Satwik blends surrealistic metaphor and surgical precision to concoct a Borgesian fictional labyrinth that thrusts the reader deep into the private parts of the Empire and its subjects,liege or otherwise.This irreverent collection of stories quite literally takes the pants off the venerable organs of the British empire and lays bare a murky underbelly of oozing flesh,putrid excretions and raw brutality.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: by Marc Weingarten In a time of frenzied cultural change,in a nation manically hopscotching from war to rock,assassination to drugs,hippies to Yippies,Kennedy to Nixon,traditional just-the -facts journalism failed to bring order to the chaos.Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period,a group of writers including Tom Wolfe,Jimmy Breslin,Gay Talese,Hunter S.Thompson,Joan Didion,John Sack and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders,including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer,to completely reinvent American letters.
Marc Weingarten provides a startling behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of the most revolutionary literary period in our country's history,a time then writer's didn't just cover stories but immersed themselves in them, and when journalism didn't just report America but shaped it.Read More...Hide Pages: 294
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.Read More...Hide Pages: 672 Accolades Man Booker Prize Man Booker Prize Winning Author
India: A Wounded Civilization by V.S. Naipaul In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's Emergency,V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians?from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay's homeless Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.Read More...Hide Pages: 161
Love Stories from the Mahabharata by Subodh Ghosh Erotic in style and content, this collection unearths the forgotten and lesser known tales of love from the great epic. In Love Stories, we get dignified women, battered by fate and their love for their men they do not lose a shred of their dignity in the process.
Parikshit and Sushobhana, Agni and Svaha, Agastya and Lopamudra, and many more lovelorn couples take us on a journey through the crosscurrents of physical desire and psychic union.
It is a translated section by Pradip Bhattacharya which take away nothing from the original, capture the interest of the reader and are praiseworthy in themselves.Read More...Hide Pages: 344
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