in Bookplaces: Sometimes you really can’t have too much of a good thing. Amrita and Samir Somaiya have done the city an enormous service with their new bookshop, Kitabkhana. Of all the bookshops in the city, it’s this one that has the most marvellous space—high ceilings in an old building, lovingly restored, the wrought-iron work retained and the woodwork polished and gleaming. It reminds you of the great bookshops in university towns like Harvard, and that shouldn’t be surprising since Samir Somaiya is an alumnus of both Cornell (where he will be teaching this summer) and Harvard. » more
Peter Godwin has carved out a niche as a skillful chronicler of politics and war in his native Zimbabwe. His 1996 memoir, “Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa,” was an affecting account of his coming-of-age in white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, where his father managed a factory and his mother, a physician, operated a rural health clinic. The story climaxed with the outbreak of the civil war that would bring the guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe to power — and with the accidental killing of Godwin’s elder sister by Rhodesian troops at a roadblock. “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa,” published in 2007, picked up the narrative with Mugabe’s evolution into a brutal dictator who stomped on the opposition, evicted thousands of white farmers in a violent land reform program and plunged his country into ruin. Now Godwin has written the third installment of what might be called his Zimbabwe trilogy. In “The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe,” he documents the 2008 presidential election and its aftermath, when Mugabe unleashed ruling-party militias in a savage campaign to keep his hold on power. » more
Some years ago, the British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them. » more
Chapter 33 of Neil MacGregor’s marvellous book-of-the-radio-series is about the Rosetta stone. This lump of granite from Egypt, “about the size of one of those large suitcases you see people trundling around on wheels at airports”, is, as he frankly admits, “decidedly dull to look at”. It earns its place in A History of the World in 100 Objects because in the 19th century the equally dull text - on tax breaks for priests, inscribed upon it, in three different languages (Greek, demotic Egyptian and hieroglyphs) - became the key to decoding the hieroglyphic script of the ancient pharaohs. » more
