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BMTimes >> Book Reviews
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
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The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - A Wow read
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'By some alchemy, Larsson has made a character who ought to be completely unbelievable into one of the most compelling and convincing in modern fiction ... one wonders what Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple would make of her, but Lisbeth Salander bids fair to join them in the ranks of crime fiction's true immortals' -Daily Telegraph
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest is the third book in Stieg Larsson's phenomenally successful trilogy of crime novels which the author delivered to his publisher just before his sudden death in 2004. Stieg Larsson was editor-in-chief of the anti-racist magazine 'Expo' and an expert on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and Nazi organisations. The unprecedented success of Larsson's books has made the Swedish journalist-author a worldwide sensation in a remarkably short span of time. He was virtually unknown outside Sweden in 2005 but in 2009, as far as global sales is concerned, he was overtaken only by Khaled Hosseini. Crime fiction in translation has made a mark before but The Millennium Trilogy, has truly become a phenomenon in the contemporary world of books.
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The Winner Stands Alone
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'This is not a thriller, but a stark portrait of where we are now', - Paulo Coelho
The above line is included in the preface to The Winner Stands Alone. Have you wondered why an author should ever make a disclaimer of this kind? It is very simple really. Coelho actually thought that his book might be interpreted as one. Remember Bernard Shaw's classic reaction after the first performance of 'Arms and the Man' received overwhelming response? Shaw said he was the only one present in the theatre who realised that the play had been a 'miserable failure'. All because, a play he had subtitled 'an anti-romantic comedy' was accepted for its elements of popular romanticism. I don't suppose Coelho actually need to be as disappointed as Shaw. A 'stark portrait of where we are now' may be a gripping narrative of realities as well. In fact, most realities are thrilling.
The novel spans for a little less than twenty-four hours and is set in Cannes, the capital of films, during the film festival. Paulo Coelho captures the life behind the glam and glitz with even the minutest nuance in its right place.
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Listening to Grasshoppers-Field notes on Democracy
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"By democracy, I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: western liberal democracy, and its variants. Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It's flawed, but it's better than anything else that's on offer," Arundhati Roy
”Listening to Grasshoppers : Field notes on Democracy” is a collection of contemporary essays that find the fierce energy of the author working overtime in a brutal dissection of the Indian system of democracy. It examines the fallacies that not only exist within the system but are actually weaved inextricably in the long tradition of individual differences that the world's largest democracy has nurtured through years. Religious high-handedness or cultural prejudice have been at the heart of most of the problems that India has faced and the situation has not got any better with existing totalitarian pockets of belief.
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