Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Bhima Lone Warrior by MT Vasudevan Nair

This is more a brief take than review. With Bhima: Lone Warrior, Kerala’s own MTV gives us the Kurukshetra war and the events leading up to it, from the perspective of Kunti’s second son. The picture that emerges very convincingly debunks the hefty, bumbling giant of popular legend and imagination. Here you have an intelligent man who…

Book review : Across the Chicken Neck by Nandita Haksar

Across the Chicken Neck by human rights activist and lawyer Nandita Haksar is a travel book with a very substantial difference. Even as Haksar and her husband Sebastian Hongray drive across the Chicken Neck, that sliver of land that connects the Northeast to the rest of India, visiting Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, the Indo-Bhutan border, what Haksar…

Book review: Delhi by Heart by Raza Rumi

A somewhat incoherent heart I really don’t know what quite to make of this book. Ahmed Rumi, a development professional from Pakistan, has occasion to visit Delhi a few times and is totally enthralled by the familiar yet unfamiliar feel of the city. So he takes quite some trouble to get to know Delhi…

Book review: Punjabi Parmesan by Pallavi Aiyar

In Punjabi Parmesan, author Pallavi Aiyar trains her incisive gaze on the European Union. If her China book, Smoke and Mirrors, was at times an amused, indulgent look at the Middle Kingdom, here the EU is placed on a cold metal tray to be scanned by a dispassionate, measuring eye. The picture that emerges is not a grand one. This…

Book review: If It`s Monday, It Must Be Madurai by Srinath Perur

If It`s Monday It must Be Madurai, Srinath Perur’s account of conducted tours he has taken hither and thither, is a neat meld of insights and spot-on snarkisms about fellow Indian journey men and women. The humour is kept gentle for the most part though the digs are pointed and strike an immediate chord with…

Book review: A Cat, A Hat and a Piece of String by Joanne Harris

Just finished an old (well, of 2012 vintage) Joanne Harris and it was like finding a stash of one’s favourite candy, carefully kept in some super-secret hiding place and then, completely and totally forgotten. A Cat, A Hat and a Piece of String is a short story collection comprising the usual J Harris bouquet: something…

Book review: All the Way to Heaven by Stephen Alter

This is more a brief take than review. Stephen Alter`s All the Way to Heaven will strike an immediate chord in anyone who loves mountains. This is an account of his childhood in Landour, lovingly and evocatively rendered. Hunting, fishing, trekking and of course going to school at Woodstock; it’s a good life indeed, and Alter…

Book review: Bookless in Baghdad by Shashi Tharoor

I’d been wanting to read this collection of essays about books and not much else, Bookless in Baghdad by Shashi Tharoor, for a while now. Picked it up for a song at the one and only Blossoms store (in Bangalore) the other day, and I’m glad I did. Tharoor in my opinion, makes a better essayist than…

Book review: The Small Wild Goose Pagoda by Irwin Allan Sealy

This cannot, in all honesty, be a fair review of Irwin Allan Sealy’s The Small Wild Goose Pagoda. And that is because I have fallen in love with the book, its content, its style, its sardonic humour. I had forgotten just how powerful a story teller Sealy is. His Trotternama, (1988?) in actual fact an Anglo-Indian nama, had…