Books for the week

The Bluest Eye

By Toni Morrison

Rs 638

The Bluest Eye, the story of a young girl’s tortured life, is not a story you can “like”. It reads like your worst nightmares, very disturbing and very graphic. It takes a strong stomach to get through this novel. But, this is just what makes the book a masterpiece, that Ms Morrison can draw such powerful feelings from readers. Toni Morrison has grown as a writer. But this book, her first, takes you to a world most didn’t know existed and evokes almost unbearably strong emotions. A must read for lovers of great literature. This is not a book you read for pleasure. It’s a book you read for the power of the written word.

Rajendra Prasad: Autobiography

By Rajendra Prasad

Rs 798

Dr Rajendra Prasad wrote the greater part of Autobiography while he was in prison between 1942 and 1945. First published in Hindi, it takes us through his childhood, his life in his village Chapra, his early education with his teacher ‘Maulvi Saheb’, his years as a student in Calcutta, his marriage at the age of twelve and his legal practice. It discusses not only his personal tribulations, but is also an examination of the last years of British colonial rule in India.

As a freedom fighter and close associate of Gandhi, he was privy to political developments in the decades before independence. He records Gandhi’s influence on him, the call for non-co-operation in Bihar as part of Gandhiji’s larger all-India movement, the boycott of foreign cloth, the shadow of communalism and the Hindu-Muslim question, Satyagraha and social reform.

Hitler: The Phenomenal

Bestselling biography

By Ian Kershaw

Rs 2,078

For most of the past century, there have been two schools of thought about Hitler and Stalin. One states that Stalin wasn’t really so bad, because he fought the Fascists; the other insists that Hitler wasn’t really so bad, because he fought the Communists. Alan Bullock leaves both viewpoints in the dustheap of history, where they belong. Both Hitler and Stalin came as close to pure evil as human beings ever get; both stood for the utter repression of the human spirit and the annihilation of anyone who might possibly be suspected of standing in their way. Bullock demonstrates this in exhaustive, but never exhausting, detail. More people should read this book, if only to be cured forever of any temptation to support any form of totalitarianism, any time, anywhere.