May 5, 2002 Welcome to a generous selection of articles from DAWN's Weekly Books & Authors. This page is updated every Sunday. For current issue Click here The ‘iceberg’ society ELITE Indian nationalism today is very different from what it was in the first two decades after Independence, when the involvement of this elite and middle class in the national movement with its progressive commitments and values was still... EXCERPTS: Before history began THE story of the aborigines of Sindh is lost in the mist of antiquity. No information regarding them can be produced from any literature. But relying on indirect sources, we may say that they were nomadic hunters of the Stone Age.... EXCERPTS: War scare Modern soap is a novel of idea-driven fiction which blends the mythical and the mundane. It is a saga of wealth, love and greed in Pakistan. The first story deals with the advent of industrialization and crony capitalism in Lahore... ARTICLES: High dropout rates FROM April 21 to 28, the global action week for education was observed in 80 countries. The idea was to draw attention to the global crisis which is denying education to... ARTICLES: Online reference BOOK publishing is like farming: a lot happens in the spring, summer is pastoral, autumn is hectic and everyone gets drunk in winter. Just now, the Anglo-American book trade is going... ARTICLES: Hawking’s brief history to get briefer A BRIEF history of time, the international bestseller which purports to unravel the fundamental questions of the universe in 144 pages, is about to become briefer.... ARTICLES: The dread of being a bystander WHAT should one do when death is dancing in the street, mercilessly stamping out innocent living human beings under its cruel feet, burning them alive, leaving their bodies to rot for... ARTICLES: For the love of reading MY ten-year old daughter is able to learn and sing out aloud all the latest pop Indian hits the moment she hears them. Same is the case with my teenage son, who knows almost all the songs that come on MTV. But try telling him to learn a stanza... AUTHOR: American with Afghan soul ON September 12, a day after the World Trade Centre was destroyed, Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American who has been making his living by writing books for American children, was upset... AUTHOR: A genius of the South “A GENIUS of the South”. That is what Alice Walker, author of The colour purple, inscribed on Zora Neale Hurston’s headstone after discovering her unmarked grave. The cemetery where Hurston was... SYNDICATED: East meets west THERE are bags of talent to be found in Hari Kunzru’s rather hyped first novel, but they’re compact in size and oddly distributed through the book. Perhaps packets of talent would... REVIEW: Will there be peace? AHMED Rashid first went to Central Asia in 1988, tracking, as he says, ‘the chimera’ of the war in Afghanistan. His aim was to learn more about the minority ethnic groups... REVIEW: Coming of age IN these celebrity-fixated times any form of publicity — good or bad — is generally regarded as favourable. So despite recent controversy, Hanif Kureishi’s status in the United Kingdom as one... REVIEW: How it all began ALASTAIR Lamb’s Incomplete partition: the genesis of the Kashmir dispute 1947-1948, which was first published in Britain in 1997, has now been reprinted in Pakistan. The book is based on meticulous... REVIEW: A poisoned future! DESCRIBED as “the biggest scientific and public-relations bombshell to hit the chemical industry since Rachel L Carson’s 1962 classic, Silent spring”, the book under review paints a frightening scenario. It enumerates... REVIEW: Affairs of the heart IN the eastern tradition, people are quite secretive about their affairs of the heart. They feel highly embarrassed when someone refers to their intimate matters. Hence the secrecy that shrouds this...

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