February 17, 2008
Welcome to a generous selection of articles from DAWN's Weekly Books & Authors.
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Another reluctant fundamentalist
 Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of a former Algerian army officer who has come to international attention for his hard-hitting novels set in political and military hotspots. The Attack, reviewed in Dawn last year, was a grim, gritty tale of an Arab Israeli who learns that his wife, a doctor, has killed herself in a suicide bombing....
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Full of scandal
 The Tudor dynasty is very, very hot right now. Last year alone saw a profusion of Tudor-themed entertainment hit our screens: from the television series, The Tudors to the Cate Blanchett-starrer Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Hot on their heels, is an adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s book The Other Boleyn Girl which is scheduled to be released later this month....
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The politics of culture
 Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik (Meeto) was doing her doctoral dissertation at Balliol College, University of Oxford when she died in January 2006. This book, compiled by Neeti Nair, presents her work on politics of identity construction in South Asia. Kumkum Sangari,...
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Ready, set, cook
 Jamie Oliver is back with another one of his must-have books, this one is titled Cook with Jamie: My guide to making you a better cook. Whether you have watched his numerous television cooking shows or used any of his six previous cookbooks, you will know that his unique style of ‘bare bones’ — simple yet tasty...
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A matter of dynasty
 Undivided India was home to several autonomous princely states; the largest and the wealthiest being Hyderabad Deccan, which enjoyed its autonomy for over 224 years. During this period, seven generations of nizams and their families ruled the Deccan up until 1948 when it was annexed to India. The dominion of the seventh nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan,...
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The most important book you’ll ever read?
 The writer’s mind is a furious being. To read with a writer’s eye is a permanent affliction of observing the world through a prism of images, stories and detail rather then cold, hard objectivism. These writers are lesser Socrates pandering through the world barefoot and threadbare, funneling philosophy, history, politics,....
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Remembering Aligarh
 Muhammad Zakir Ali Khan, now an octogenarian, has been a very active and popular figure in the social circles of Karachi since a long time. The Aligarh Muslim University Old Boys Association of Pakistan, of which he is the general secretary for the last several decades, was the forum mainly used by him for his multifarious activities....
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Kicking up a storm
 Professor Neil Postman, in his spellbinding book Amusing Ourselves to Death, emphatically points out that human beings have enslaved themselves to modern technology, which will inevitably lead to their ultimate extinction. In a similar vein, Martin Rays, in his book Extinction of Mankind After 31st December 2099,...
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An extraordinary effort
 Garcin de Tassy, eminent French Orientalist of the 19th century, commenting on Syed Ahmad Khan’s tafsir of the Bible observed that this work would earn the wrath of conservative ulema and will not be appreciated by the Christian scholars either....
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Body of evidence
 The book begins bang with a list of ‘Contents’. No introduction, no preface or foreword. A small blurb on the inside of the back cover informs the reader that Ambarsih Satwik is a surgeon and that Perineum is his first novel. The sub-title of the book is ‘Nether parts of the empire....
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Once glorious Delhi
Among the host of writings in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Mutiny of 1857, Zahir Dehlavi’s Dastan-i-Ghadar stands out as perhaps the most comprehensive eye-witness account of the event which had its epicentre in Delhi, the seat of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. Barring the inevitable limitations of a purely personal record in terms...
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