Friday, August 31, 2018
SOUTH ASIA
According the Wikipedia, "The current territories of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form South Asia."
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Aranyak (The India List), introduced and translated from the Bengali by Rimi Bhattacharya (New York: Seagull Books, 2017) (From the back cover: "Satyacharan is a graduate in 1920s Calcutta, who, unable to find a job in the city, takes up the post of a 'manage' of a vast tract of forested land in neighboring Bihar. As he is enchanted and hypnotized by the exquisite beauty of nature, he is also burdened with the painful task of clearing this land for cultivation. Ancient trees fall to the cultivator's axe, and indigenous tribes--to whom the forest had been home for millennia--lose their ancient way of life, and the narrator chronicles in visionary prose the tale of destruction and dispossession that is the universal saga of man's struggle to bend nature to his will.").
Sujatha Gilda, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017).
Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "In the third century BCE, Ashoka ruled an empire encompassing much of modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. During his reign, Buddhism proliferated across the South Asian subcontinent, and future generations of Asians came to see him as the ideal Buddhist king. Disentangling the threads of Ashoka's life from the knot of legend that surround it, Nayanjot Lahiri present a vivid biography of this extraordinary Indian emperor and deepens out understanding of a legacy that extends beyond the bounds of Ashoka's lifetime and dominion.").
Sanjay Subramanyam, Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "When the Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in the subcontinent in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of India. The maritime passage opened new opportunities for exchange of goods as well as ideas. Traders were joined by ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars from Portugal, England, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany, all hoping to learn about India for reasons as varied as their particular nationalities and professions. In the following centuries they produced a body of knowledge about India that significantly shaped European thought." "Europe's India tracks Europeans' changing ideas of India over the entire modern period.").
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Aranyak (The India List), introduced and translated from the Bengali by Rimi Bhattacharya (New York: Seagull Books, 2017) (From the back cover: "Satyacharan is a graduate in 1920s Calcutta, who, unable to find a job in the city, takes up the post of a 'manage' of a vast tract of forested land in neighboring Bihar. As he is enchanted and hypnotized by the exquisite beauty of nature, he is also burdened with the painful task of clearing this land for cultivation. Ancient trees fall to the cultivator's axe, and indigenous tribes--to whom the forest had been home for millennia--lose their ancient way of life, and the narrator chronicles in visionary prose the tale of destruction and dispossession that is the universal saga of man's struggle to bend nature to his will.").
Sujatha Gilda, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017).
Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "In the third century BCE, Ashoka ruled an empire encompassing much of modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. During his reign, Buddhism proliferated across the South Asian subcontinent, and future generations of Asians came to see him as the ideal Buddhist king. Disentangling the threads of Ashoka's life from the knot of legend that surround it, Nayanjot Lahiri present a vivid biography of this extraordinary Indian emperor and deepens out understanding of a legacy that extends beyond the bounds of Ashoka's lifetime and dominion.").
Sanjay Subramanyam, Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "When the Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in the subcontinent in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of India. The maritime passage opened new opportunities for exchange of goods as well as ideas. Traders were joined by ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars from Portugal, England, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany, all hoping to learn about India for reasons as varied as their particular nationalities and professions. In the following centuries they produced a body of knowledge about India that significantly shaped European thought." "Europe's India tracks Europeans' changing ideas of India over the entire modern period.").
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
THE ROAD TO, AND CONSEQUENCE OF, THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRASH
Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018) ("What made the collapse of 2008 so severe was its extraordinary global synchronization. Of the 104 countries for which the World Trade Organization collects data, every single one experienced a fall in both imports and exports between the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009. Every country and every type of traded goods, without exception, experienced a decline." Id. at 159. "Precisely how many people lost their jobs across the global economy depends snout guess as to joblessness among China's migrant workforce. But reasonable estimates range between 27 million and something closer to 40 million unemployed worldwide." Id. at 160.).
Monday, August 27, 2018
INSPECTOR MAIGRET #34
Georges Simenon, Madame Maigret's Friend (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).
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