“Devnaa’s India:Delicious Vegetarian Home Cooking & Street Food”

“Devnaa’s India: Delicious Vegetarian Home Cooking & Street Food” by Roopa Rawal will be a welcome addition to the cookbook collection in the kitchen book shelf of those in the UK and elsewhere who are developing a new-found taste for Indian vegetarian cuisine.

The Best of American Magazine Writing

To tell you the truth as  a kid, it was my ambition to become a journalist. I would have loved to have become one but in the India of the ’60s and ’70s where I grew up, it wasn’t considered to be a hot career. At least that was the case in my family.  I have loved and followed magazine writing over the years. As a writer myself, I have often felt the short, terse sentences and the pace of the articles written in magazines call for special skills. Some of these are  quite different from those you would need for a long novel, though basic elements of good writing would undoubtedly remain the same.

“The Best Of American Magazine Writing, 2013” from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in collaboration with the Columbia University Press, makes for interesting reading. The Editor in Chief of The Atlantic, James Bennett and Sid Holt, Chief Executive of the ASME deserve credit for having put together such an interesting anthology. As the name suggests, this is an annual compendium of the best articles written in different magazines which cover a wide variety of subjects from politics to stories of human interest. They cover works of public interest, reporting, feature writing, and fiction. Many of these articles have been adjudged winners in the National Magazine awards.

First up you read a fascinating article which first appeared in The Atlantic, “Fear Of A Black President” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. After all Barack Obama made history when he was elected the 44th President of the United States. Sure, he was one of the few African-Americans to graduate from Columbia University and the Harvard Law School, but how would he fare as the President in very demanding times?

I was delighted to find a short story by Stephen King, “Batman and Robin Have An Altercation” from Harper’s. I have admired his writing over the years. Most of all, I am grateful to King for his little book on Writing.

Some of the others which stayed in my mind (and perhaps indicate my areas of particular interest) are:

• “Did You Think About The Six People You Executed” by Robert F. Worth of the New York Times in ‘Reporting.”
• “Ten Days Inside The Mansion- and the Mind- of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Internet, by Charles Graeber in Wired.
• “The Innocent Man” by Pamela Colloff, in Texas Monthly in the category of Feature Writing incorporating Profile Writing.

If you want to gift someone with thought-provoking yet interesting reading for the festive season, why don’t you consider “The Best of American Magazine Writing, 2013 ?”

 

 

Manreet S. Someshwar’s latest. Also Writers on Writing.

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s latest novel, ” The Hunt for Kohinoor” (Westland, 2013) is slated to be released  in mid-December 2013. As is common these days, you can pre-order this at Flipkart.  This, if I am not mistaken, is a sequel to her earlier book, “The Taj Conspiracy” which was very interesting. I loved her first book, “The Long Walk Home,” which was set in the Punjab at the time of the Partition. My best wishes go out to Manreet. May ” The Hunt For Kohinoor” be a super hit!

Many people have the urge to write and write well. However, not everyone makes the grade. In this context, I liked this blog post by Maria Popova in Brainpickings called, “9 Books on Reading and Writing.” With gems from authors like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, this post points you to books that can transform your writing.

A few extracts:

• Anne Lamott in ” Bird By Bird, A Few Instructions on Writing and Life,”

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

• Stephen King in his classic,  “On Writing:A Memoir of the Craft”

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

• Ernest Hemingway in ” Ernest Hemingway On Writing”

” The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”

“The Last Clinic”: Gary Gusick

” The Last Clinic” the debut novel of  Gary Gusick is set in the American South and features Detective Darla Cavannah of the Sheriff’s office in Jackson, Mississippi with all its nuances of a small town in the Deep South.

“Little Man From The East” : Maj. Gen. M.K.Paul (Retd)

“Little Man From The East: Marching Through Tumultuous Decades” is , in my view, a “must read” for anyone interested in 20 th century Indian history. It also happens to be the story of a soldier engineer commissioned into one of the oldest Regiments in the Indian Army,  the famous Madras Engineer Group ( more commonly called The Madras Sappers, and more fondly as ‘The Thambis’) first raised  in 1780.  Major General M K Paul (retd), the author, served with distinction in the Indian Army for nearly 37 years before retiring in 1991.

The Kennedy Imperative: Leon Berger

Being an avid fan of both historical fiction and John F. Kennedy, I immediately reached out for Leon Berger’s “The Kennedy Imperative.” I find that this is the first of The Kennedy Trilogy and was published in September 2013 by Premier Digital Publishing. The other two are scheduled to be published later this year.

“Case Closed” : Gerald Posner

“Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” by Gerald Posner is by far the most comprehensive book I have read about that event that shocked the world way back in November 1963. First published in 1993 and now re-published in 2013 as an ebook, nearly 50 years after that fateful day in Dallas, Tx, Posner explains painstakingly why all the many conspiracy theories are just that, theories without substance.

“Deadly Skies”: Bernard T. Nolan

Who can write better about an air war than someone who has been there and seen it for himself? “The Deadly Skies: The Air War in Europe 1939-1945” is by Bernard Nolan who was a young co-pilot and later commander of B-24s and B-17s in the 8th Bomber Command of the USAF during the Second World War. This book, which covers the air wars in Europe from 1939 to 1945, is by a retired Lt. Col. in the USAF who flew 33 combat missions and is qualified to speak of the experiences air crew ( those in bombers, in particular) had in their long flights into far away Germany from bases in the UK.

“Social Media For The Executive”: Brian E. Boyd, Sr.

Social media is fast enveloping our lives and there’s no getting away from it. Both professionally and personally, use of social media is sky rocketing by the day as more people jump into the fray to derive the benefits of a revolution whose time has come. Older people, both in business and in their own capacities, who were more skeptical a few years ago, now recognize that social media can give them benefits they had not imagined they would get earlier. Likewise, professionals and men and women in business see social media as a huge opportunity to communicate their brand and develop their business.

“No End Save Victory”: edited by Robert Cowley

I have read hundreds of books about the Second World War but “No End Save Victory: Perspectives of World War II” edited by Robert Cowley must rank as being one of the best. I had looked at this book several times and kept it back in its assigned shelf in the library I use, daunted by its size, (688 pages), but some weeks ago I decided to give it another shot, and am so glad I did so.