April 20, 2003 Welcome to a generous selection of articles from DAWN's Weekly Books & Authors. This page is updated every Sunday. For current issue Click here Not quite ready, yet Nepal, however, was not in the grip of a ‘revolution of rising expectations’. The majority of its inhabitants were unaware that a way of life different from their own even existed.... EXCERPTS: A story of philanthropy In chronological terms the next distant base was Hyderabad in Sindh which dates back to the 1820s and shortly afterwards the Parsis came to Karachi.... ARTICLES: Paradox of creativity and self-destruction It is easier to understand the movie “The Hours” if you have read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It is easier still if you have also read Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel... ARTICLES: Is the serious bestseller dying? Recently, I was on the panel for a debate at the London Book Fair entitled “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Although the audience largely comprised representatives of the publishing industry,... ARTICLES: Whither books for children? Children’s books have been around for a long time now. Every language has children’s literature and every country has publishers who give it special emphasis. In Urdu, children’s literature got a... AUTHOR: Iftikhar Arif: Civilized but defiant Iftikhar Arif has sometimes been called a poet of civilized protest. An Urdu poet of significance of the post-Faiz generation, he draws his inspiration from Mir, Ghalib, Firaq and Ra’shid. Faiz... AUTHOR: Percival Everett: Colour bind “I am good at math. I cannot dance...” Thelonious Monk Ellison, the narrator of Erasure, Percival Everett’s latest novel, tells us on the very first page. “I did not grow up... SYNDICATED REVIEWS: Bane of excessive secrecy A quarter of a century ago the Central Intelligence Agency decided to take a hard look at the psychological effects that its arcane secrecy system was having on employees. The study... SYNDICATED REVIEWS: The buck never stops In the months that followed the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon a ragbag collection of weird stories started appearing in the newspapers. There was the friend of... REVIEWS: Women in a changing India Women in India now vote and have as much access to education as men do. They have at least on paper, equal inheritance rights to property, they have been guaranteed a... REVIEWS: Divisions of race and class Tariq Rahman is a well-known academic and critic. He is also a short story writer. His new book consists of a selection of stories which were published in his three previous... REVIEWS: Do nuclear weapons give strength? Spanning over seven hundred pages, the book is a recent addition to the impressive literature on India’s nuclear programme and strategic thinking. Its five chapters try to bring a new perspective... REVIEWS: Recurring nightmare Isabel Allende, one of South America’s foremost writers, is an old hand at creating sprawling family sagas full of surging emotions. Love affairs, revolutions, jealousies, and magic occupy the pages of... REVIEWS: Turning the black into white In his book The Black Economy in India, economist Arun Kumar makes a disclosure that has a familiar ring. He notes that the black economy in India is believed to have... REVIEWS: Bitter truths about better-halves Every time you return to Karachi — the most modern of all Pakistani cities — from the west, or even from the next door Mumbai, you are struck by the near... IN BRIEF Abul Hasan Naghmi joined Radio Pakistan, Lahore, during the early 50s. After working there for some 20 years he went on to join the Voice of America’s Urdu service....

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