Unromantic Ruins
Pankaj Mishra is back with a big book—From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. It’s about how the marauding West was gunning down the last heirs of the Mughals, burning down Beijing’s Summer Palace and ravaging the Ottoman Empire. And how groups of intellectuals everywhere stood up to this onslaught with creative ideas like Indian nationalism, the Chinese Communist Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. After his run-in with Niall Ferguson over Civilizations: The West and Rest, when his criticism led to a lot of bad blood, is this Pankaj’s way of matching him book for book?
That’s Amore
In this fickle world, it’s heart-warming when middle-aged authors are so completely head-over-heels in love with their wives. ‘For Sunanda, the love of my life and the life of my love’, reads Shashi Tharoor’s dedication of his new book Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century (excerpted in this issue). Sometime ago, there was a buzz that Tharoor was keen to write a book about their love, and he had tweeted that it was the publisher’s idea, not his. After this treatise on Indian diplomacy, time for a frothy recent autobiography?
Pull From The Eye
Cricketer Yuvraj Singh is coming out with an “open, candid, intimate” account of how he fought cancer with In Different Form, to be published by Random House in December this year. Yuvraj will reveal how debilitating the disease was—coughing fits that left him vomiting blood—and how he finally won. He hopes the book will inspire millions who suffer from cancer to fight back.
