Stephen Alter - Comfortably Numb

Book review: The Cobra`s Gaze by Stephen Alter

Where the wild things are This is such an important work, a masterclass in ecological awareness for those of us who would read, absorb, learn. In an intense effort to show us the missing link between animals, birds and humans, how we perceive other species through our umwelt or sensory bubble, project human expectations on…

Book review: Feral Dreams/ Mowgli and His Mothers by Stephen Alter

FERAL DREAMS, Mowgli and his Mothers by Stephen Alter. Aleph Books. The book had me at its cover pic, that much I will tell you. The pic, by Sangram Govardhane, being a herd of elephants on the move, with a diffusion of glorious light at their back. Then I started to read and Alter`s fluid…

Book review: Becoming A Mountain by Stephen Alter

Becoming a Mountain Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime By Stephen Alter (Aleph Publications) Mountains, says Alter, have been endowed through history with nobility, wisdom, omniscience, as well as described as fearsome, treacherous, demonic. Of course, all this is but the expression of human sensibilities towards the natural world. The…

Book review: In the Jungles of the Night, A Novel about Jim Corbett by Stephen Alter

First a sort of disclaimer: I grew up on a steady diet of Corbett’s tales of the man-eaters he had encountered and bested; and later on, I grew to really like Stephen Alter’s accounts of life of men and mountains. So this was a double delight for me: Stephen Alter in the voice of Jim…

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…