July 13, 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 Demonstrating with passion WE didn’t go back to Islamabad, though. That was too far away from the Afghan border, too full of journalists, too comfortable. Islamabad is a new city, a pleasant, green, wooded place constructed along the lines of New Delhi... Excerpts: Rumpus at the funeral THE garden exploded with the twittering of tufted bulbuls and squawking mynas. Jamun and fig trees were in bloom. She turned down a path that led to the pergola beyond which her family had taken tea every evening... Articles: Parallelism of East and West SULTAN Bahu (1629-1691) and John Donne (1572-1631) were writing religious and metaphysical verses in the seventeenth century. John Donne, the first of the English metaphysicals, attempted to grasp the enormity of... Articles: Of poets and politics INCREDIBLE but, simultaneously, it was amusing and interesting for me to learn that the American poets do not speak to people. It was argued here recently. They do not play an... Author: Man of his age SOME writers seem entwined with their age. One reads the profile of an entire period in them. Their work displays the best and the worst of an entire epoch. Firaq Gorakhpuri... Syndicated Reviews: Shock and awe KRAKATOA exploded at 10:02am on Monday, August 27, 1883. Under the impact of the blast, 13 per cent of the Earth’s surface vibrated. Six cubic miles of rock were vaporized. The... Syndicated Reviews: Darkness on the edge JULIE Myerson’s fiction has taken a truly macabre turn. Her last novel, Laura Blundy, opened with a horrifically matter-of-fact description of the heroine shoving a sharp implement into her husband’s face, depicting how she digs in hard “as a gardener does... a definite juicy crunch, like going into a raw potato”.... Review: Silence of the scientists IF you are not interested in science, this journal is a difficult wade through — full of obscure terminology and scientific jargon. It’s a pity, though. For the subject is interesting... Review: Reliving history HUMANITY’S connection to history is like a chain, according to Nietzsche. It creates us and gives meaning to our existence. Like a cord it grips us no matter how far we might go. However, history is often hijacked by those in power... Review: Many faces of a city IN THE 20th century, the city of Bombay, as the authors state in their preface to the book under review, made a transition to become of the world’s mega-cities. This wasn’t... Review: Can they, can’t they? THE much dreaded “T” word — terrorism — when suffixed with ‘nuclear’ provides a combination fit for Hollywood thrillers and activates the strategic pundits who thrive on alarmism. If the countries... Review: Comfortably numb until... THE opening sentence of Unless by Carol Shields is not unlike Life of Pi by Yann Martel. “It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now” is similar to the foreboding... Review: Creating room for themselves THIS book comprises six lengthy interviews of educated Pakistani women who have achieved unusual visibility in one form or the other. The women are Nilofar Ahmed, Quratul Ain Bakhteari, Sajeda Mokarram... Review: Iqbal as he was AS A poet, Iqbal has few peers and his fame as such remains, to this day, undiminished. The book under review, Muslim Political Thought — A Reconstruction presents his political writings... Review: Writing poetry in red IN THE preface of Kaifi Azmi‘s first collection of poems, Jhankar, published in 1944, Sajjad Zaheer, the doyen of the progressive writers‘ movement in the subcontinent, described the poet as “a... Review: Entering the mainstream HALI’S introduction to his Dewan attracted more attention than the poetry itself, so much that in subsequent editions the introduction had to be issued separately. Hali was a great literary figure...

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