en-US Fri, 09 May 2025 12:16:04 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 59571889
This book unveils the ugly face of governments and investigative agencies, modus operandi of police, ATS and investigative agencies, their inhumane tortures, legal tactics employed and the secrets of court cases.

Innocents implicated in terror cases will find courage to fight their legal battles through this book. The reality of the blast cases and the tall claims made by police and media are exposed in this book.

The author himself was a victim of torture and tactics of police and investigative agencies. He has narrated first-hand experiences of himself and some other innocent prisoners at the hands of police, investigative agencies and officials of the jail system.

This book is not just a testimony of the innocence of a person acquitted of all charges in an infamous “terrorâ€� case, it also showcases his unmoved resolve to fight the legal battle for his freedom. It also is a manual on how not to get yourself entangled in the vicious web of false implication in the first place and how to secure freedom from the clutches of monsters in uniform, if arrested.]]> 504 Abdul Wahid Shaikh 8172211163 Aashish 0 5.00
author: Abdul Wahid Shaikh
name: Aashish
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/09
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, biographies, socio-cultural
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]]> 58892814
India is justly proud of a parliamentary democracy that has never been threatened by a military coup. No mean feat in a neighbourhood where coups are common and notions of constitutionality shaky. However, for decades now, India’s democratic standing has been steadily declining. An international analysis recently rated the country as only ‘partly freeâ€�, while another deemed it an ‘electoral autocracyâ€�.

Josy Joseph investigates this decline and comes away with a key that the process of confronting militancy has warped the system. As insurgencies erupted across India, and grew increasingly more sophisticated in the 1980s and â€�90s, the security establishment struggled to keep up. Increasingly overwhelmed, the police forces, intelligence agencies, federal investigation agencies, tax departments and the like came up with ingenious—at times sinisterâ€� from faking and framing evidence to staging massive terror attacks and even creating terrorist organisations. Over time, militancy became a flourishing, multi-faceted business enterprise.

From the Kashmiri militancy to the Sri Lankan civil war, from the attack on Mumbai to the long-term unrest in the Northeast, India’s ‘war on terrorâ€� has made its security institutions more nationalistic and chauvinistic and, inevitably, more corrupt. Most dangerously, there is a near-complete capture of the security apparatus, whether investigative agencies, police or intelligence, by the political executive—serving as stormtroopers with no accountability, rather than as defenders of the Constitution.

The result of more than two decades of reporting on insurgencies, terrorism and the security establishment, The Silent Coup is a wake-up call to the nation. You do not need a military coup to subvert democracy, Joseph says—in India, it has already been subverted.]]> 306 Josy Joseph 9390679532 Aashish 0 4.37 2021
author: Josy Joseph
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/09
shelves: avail, lit-indic, politics-econ-ir-etc, currently-reading
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]]> 27840847 An outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts
In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago, in German New Guinea. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to establish a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.
Christian Kracht's "Imperium" uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt is at once a pitiable, misunderstood outsider and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.
Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales such as "Treasure Island" and "Robinson Crusoe," Kracht's novel, an international bestseller, is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant. His allusions are misleading, his historical time line is twisted, his narrator is unreliable--and the result is a novel that is a cabinet of mirrors, a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a serious meditation on the fragility and audacity of human activity, "Imperium" is impossible to categorize and utterly unlike anything you've read before.]]> 192 Christian Kracht 1250097479 Aashish 5 3.34 2012
author: Christian Kracht
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/07
date added: 2025/05/07
shelves: avail, translated, lit-western, lang-european-modern, lang-german
review:

]]> 1556746 366 George S. Boolos 0521701465 Aashish 0 4.16 1980
author: George S. Boolos
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, math, philosophy, stem
review:

]]> 10544563 English 0 Daya Krishna 8120807987 Aashish 0 3.00 1999
author: Daya Krishna
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, philosophy, lit-indic
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]]> 39233394 240 Shyam Ranganathan 1138909106 Aashish 0 3.00
author: Shyam Ranganathan
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, philosophy, socio-cultural
review:

]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Aashish 0 avail, lit-tbr 3.92
author: Thomas Mann
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: avail, lit-tbr
review:

]]> 1890432 492 Frits Staal 0820424188 Aashish 0 4.13 1990
author: Frits Staal
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, philosophy, socio-cultural
review:

]]> 734206 197 J.L. Berggren 0387406050 Aashish 0 3.94 1986
author: J.L. Berggren
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: nonfic-tbr, math, history, avail-not
review:

]]> 706680 976 Ivor Grattan-Guinness 0801873967 Aashish 0 4.00 1993
author: Ivor Grattan-Guinness
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, history, math
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]]> 687306 774 Bruce G. Trigger 0521705452 Aashish 0 3.74 2003
author: Bruce G. Trigger
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, history
review:

]]> 60034380
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history - in his case, not longue durĂŠe or micro-history, but 'connected history': connected cross-culturally, and spanning regions, subjects and archives that are conventionally treated alone. Not a research paradigm, he insists, it is more of an oppositionswissenschaft, a way of trying to constantly break the moulds of historical objects.

The essays collected here, some quite polemical - as in the lead text on the notion of India-as-civilization, or another, assessing such a literary totem as V. S. Naipaul - illustrate the breadth of Subrahmanyam's concerns, as well as the quality of his writing. Connected History considers what, exactly, is an empire, the rise of 'the West' (less of a place than an idea or ideology, he insists), Churchill and the Great Man theory of history, the reception of world literature and the itinerary of subaltern studies, in addition to personal recollections of life and work in Delhi, Paris and Lisbon, and concluding remarks on the practice of early-modern history and the framing of historical enquiry.]]> 196 Sanjay Subrahmanyam 1839762381 Aashish 3 3.38
author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.38
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: avail-not, anthology-collection, lit-indic, history, essays
review:

]]> 677840 394 Eric J. Hobsbawm 0349104808 Aashish 4 avail, history, owned 4.16 1975
author: Eric J. Hobsbawm
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: avail, history, owned
review:

]]> 120843855
How far did colonialism transform north Indian music? In the period between the Mughal empire and the British Raj, how did the political landscape bleed into aesthetics, music, dance, and poetry? Examining musical culture through a diverse and multilingual archive, primarily using sources in Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi that have not been translated or critically examined before, The Scattered Court challenges our assumptions about the period. Richard David Williams presents a long history of interactions between northern India and Bengal, with a core focus on the two courts of Wajid Ali Shah (1822�1887), the last ruler of the kingdom of Awadh. He charts the movement of musicians and dancers between the two courts in Lucknow and Matiyaburj, as well as the transregional circulation of intellectual traditions and musical genres, and demonstrates the importance of the exile period for the rise of Calcutta as a celebrated center of Hindustani classical music. Since Lucknow is associated with late Mughal or Nawabi society and Calcutta with colonial modernity, examining the relationship between the two cities sheds light on forms of continuity and transition over the nineteenth century, as artists and their patrons navigated political ruptures and social transformations. The Scattered Court challenges the existing historiography of Hindustani music and Indian culture under colonialism by arguing that our focus on Anglophone sources and modernizing impulses has directed us away from the aesthetic subtleties, historical continuities, and emotional dimensions of nineteenth-century music.]]> 275 Richard David Williams 0226825450 Aashish 0 0.0
author: Richard David Williams
name: Aashish
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, music, history
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]]> 39663305 by J.K. Samal And P.K. Nayak

I was induced to write this book to fill up a vacuum whose very emptiness is proof of an important missing Jink. There are not many books on the history of the social reform movement in India, but even these few have chosen to completely ignore the role of the women in it. It is as though whatever changes were brought about, were the outcome of men’s endeavour alone for social changes and thereby for the amelioration of the women. A grievous injustice has been done to the heroic efforts of countless women who strove against unimaginable deterrents, to serve the cause of their betterment. Women did valiant service not only pushing forward their own progress but acting as levers to help other oppressed sections, while facing fierce hostility. In the Indian scene today where social work has become just a profession or at the most a leisure hour pastime for the affluent class women, it is difficult to visualise the crusaders of long ago, working with passion, pursuing a goal laboriously, seeking nothing for themselves. There were no grants to feed such activities; no awards, titles, national recognition, no press publicity—instead a lot of abuse. Patience and forbearance with wisdom and tact so as not to kill an opportunity or outrage sentiments that would recoil.

The present day young women are totally unaware of the past social struggle or its nature. The past is regarded with rather a withering contempt for the leadership of that time. If conditions were so bad why did the women not revolt, they ask.

About The Author :-

Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, who is known for her participation in the Freedom Struggle of India as well as for having initiated and organised India's cultural renaissance, is also one of the most effective constructive works in india.

In her recent book, she assails the usual interpretation-that the fairly progressive dejure position of women in the freedom struggle was entirely due to male social reformers and Ganbhiji. It subtly shows that it was organised advocacy by women which influenced leaders including gandhi.

It has similar other new historical facts and the underlying philosophy that women's struggle should be for a "total societal change", and not for partial crumbs.]]> 148 Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay Aashish 0 0.0
author: Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay
name: Aashish
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/25
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]]> 232431 Dancer from the Dance is truthful, provocative, outrageous fiction told in a voice as close to laughter as to tears.]]> 250 Andrew Holleran 0060937068 Aashish 0 3.99 1978
author: Andrew Holleran
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: lit-queer, owned, avail, currently-reading
review:

]]> 132828369 455 Jane Austen Aashish 3 3.50 1814
author: Jane Austen
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1814
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: avail, lit-british, lit-western, owned, time-1800-99
review:

]]> 576785
The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is a lively -- and opinionated -- musical history and an insider's key to the personalities, epochs, and genres of the Western classical tradition. Among its
-- chronologically arranged essays on nearly 100 composers, from Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) to Aaron Copland (1900-1990), that combine biography with detailed analyses of the major works while assessing their role in the social, cultural, and political climate of their times;
-- informative sidebars that clarify broader topics such as melody, polyphony, atonality, and the impact of the early-music movement;
-- a glossary of musical terms, from a cappella to woodwinds;
-- a step-by-step guide to building a great classical music library.

Written with wit and a clarity that both musical experts and beginners can appreciate, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is an invaluable source-book for music lovers everywhere.]]> 624 Jan Swafford 0679728058 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail-not, music 4.28 1992
author: Jan Swafford
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, music
review:

]]> 301304 367 Pramoedya Ananta Toer 0140256350 Aashish 0 4.14 1980
author: Pramoedya Ananta Toer
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-sea, translated
review:

]]> 354654 544 Patrick Olivelle 0195305329 Aashish 0 4.00 2006
author: Patrick Olivelle
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, history, lit-indic
review:

]]> 12325174 688 E.J. Michael Witzel 0199812853 Aashish 0 4.00 2012
author: E.J. Michael Witzel
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, history, socio-cultural
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]]> 23528934
"Greek Buddha" shows how Buddhism shaped the philosophy of Pyrrho, the famous founder of Pyrrhonian scepticism in ancient Greece. Identifying Pyrrho's basic teachings with those of Early Buddhism, Christopher I. Beckwith traces the origins of a major tradition in Greek philosophy to Gandh?ra, a country in Central Asia and northwestern India.
Pyrrho of Elis accompanied Alexander the Great to Central Asia and India during the Graeco-Macedonian invasion and conquest of the Persian Empire in 334-324 BC, and while there met with teachers of Early Buddhism, a philosophy that Beckwith analyzes in depth. Using a range of primary sources, he systematically looks at the teachings and practices of Pyrrho and of Early Buddhism, including those preserved in testimonies by and about Pyrrho, in the report on Indian philosophy two decades later by the Seleucid ambassador Megasthenes, in the first-person edicts by the Indian king Dev?n priya Priyadar?i referring to a popular variety of the Dharma in the early third century BC, and in Taoist echoes of Gautama's Dharma in Warring States China. Beckwith demonstrates how the teachings of Pyrrho agree closely with those of the Buddha kyamuni, "the Scythian Sage." In the process, he identifies eight distinct attested philosophical schools in ancient northwestern India and Central Asia, including Early Zoroastrianism, Early Brahmanism, and several forms of Early Buddhism. Beckwith then shows the influence that Pyrrho's brand of scepticism had on the evolution of Western thought, first in Antiquity, and later, during the Enlightenment, on the great philosopher and self-proclaimed "Pyrrhonian," David Hume.

"Greek Buddha" demonstrates that through Pyrrho, Early Buddhist thought had a significant impact on Western philosophy.
]]> 304 Christopher I. Beckwith 0691166447 Aashish 0 3.90 2015
author: Christopher I. Beckwith
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-western, history
review:

]]> 1396090 443 George S. Boolos 067453767X Aashish 0 4.14 1998
author: George S. Boolos
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, philosophy, anthology-collection
review:

]]> 1107349 240 Mikel Burley 0415394481 Aashish 0 4.25 2006
author: Mikel Burley
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, philosophy, lit-indic
review:

]]> 386299 128 Ernest Hemingway Aashish 4 avail, lit-western 3.56 1952
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: avail, lit-western
review:

]]> 30763882
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.

Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.]]> 183 Samanta Schweblin 0399184597 Aashish 5 3.62 2014
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: avail, translated, lang-european-modern
review:

]]> 1034948 A different book for this isbn can be found here.

Eric Hobsbawm traces with brilliant analytical clarity the transformation brought about in every sphere of European life by the Dual revolution - the 1789 French revolution and the Industrial Revolution that originated in Britain. This enthralling and original account highlights the significant sixty years when industrial capitalism established itself in Western Europe and when Europe established the domination over the rest of the world it was to hold for half a century.]]> 413 Eric J. Hobsbawm 0349104840 Aashish 4 history, avail, owned 4.10 1962
author: Eric J. Hobsbawm
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: history, avail, owned
review:

]]> 695429 Principia Mathematica and Related Systems." This revolutionary paper challenged certain basic assumptions underlying much research in mathematics and logic. GĂśdel received public recognition of his work in 1951 when he was awarded the first Albert Einstein Award for achievement in the natural sciences--perhaps the highest award of its kind in the United States. The award committee described his work in mathematical logic as "one of the greatest contributions to the sciences in recent times."

However, few mathematicians of the time were equipped to understand the young scholar's complex proof. Ernest Nagel and James Newman provide a readable and accessible explanation to both scholars and non-specialists of the main ideas and broad implications of GĂśdel's discovery. It offers every educated person with a taste for logic and philosophy the chance to understand a previously difficult and inaccessible subject.

New York University Press is proud to publish this special edition of one of its bestselling books. With a new introduction by Douglas R. Hofstadter, this book will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals in the fields of mathematics, computer science, logic and philosophy, and science.]]> 125 Ernest Nagel 0814758169 Aashish 0 4.18 1958
author: Ernest Nagel
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: avail-not, math, nonfic-tbr, philosophy
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]]> 52973207 An award-winning author reconsiders the role of historians in political debate.

For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

Satia makes clear that historical imagination played a significant role in the unfolding of empire. History emerged as a mode of ethics in the modern period, endowing historians from John Stuart Mill to Winston Churchill with outsized policymaking power. At key moments in Satia's telling, we find Britons warding off guilty conscience by recourse to particular notions of history, especially those that spotlighted great men helpless before the will of Providence. Braided with this story is an account of alternative visions articulated by anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi, and E.P. Thompson. By the mid-twentieth century, their approaches had reshaped the discipline of history and the ethics that came with it.

Time's Monster demonstrates the dramatic consequences of writing history today as much as in the past. Against the backdrop of enduring global inequalities, debates about reparations, and the crisis in the humanities, Satia's is an urgent moral voice.]]> 384 Priya Satia 0674248376 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail, history 4.00 2020
author: Priya Satia
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail, history
review:

]]> 7855614 416 Muzaffar Alam 0521129559 Aashish 0 4.00 2006
author: Muzaffar Alam
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, history, lit-indic
review:

]]> 70451719
This book is an important reading for students, scholars, and teachers of Mughal history and early modern India.]]> 382 Muzaffar Alam Aashish 0 0.0 1988
author: Muzaffar Alam
name: Aashish
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, history
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]]> 52240856 A sweeping, magisterial new history of India from the middle ages to the arrival of the British
The Indian subcontinent might seem a self-contained world. Protected by vast mountains and seas, it has created its own religions, philosophies and social systems. And yet this ancient land experienced prolonged and intense interaction with the peoples and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa and, especially, Central Asia and the Iranian plateau between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries.

Richard M. Eaton's wonderful new book tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality. His major theme is the rise of 'Persianate' culture - a many-faceted transregional world informed by a canon of texts that circulated through ever-widening networks across much of Asia. Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become thoroughly indigenized by the time of the great Mughals in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This long-term process of cultural interaction and assimilation is reflected in India's language, literature, cuisine, attire, religion, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, architecture, and more.

The book brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India's Sanskrit culture - which continued to flourish and grow throughout this period - and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and a host of regional states, and made India what it is today.]]> 512 Richard M. Eaton 0141985399 Aashish 0 4.18 2019
author: Richard M. Eaton
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> 53435346
Audrey Truschke offers a groundbreaking analysis of these Sanskrit texts that sheds light on both historical Muslim political leaders on the subcontinent and how premodern Sanskrit intellectuals perceived the “Muslim Other.â€� She analyzes and theorizes how Sanskrit historians used the tools of their literary tradition to document Muslim governance and, later, as Muslims became an integral part of Indian cultural and political worlds, Indo-Muslim rule. Truschke demonstrates how this new archive lends insight into formulations and expressions of premodern political, social, cultural, and religious identities. By elaborating the languages and identities at play in premodern Sanskrit historical works, this book expands our historical and conceptual resources for understanding premodern South Asia, Indian intellectual history, and the impact of Muslim peoples on non-Muslim societies.

At a time when exclusionary Hindu nationalism, which often grounds its claims on fabricated visions of India’s premodernity, dominates the Indian public sphere, The Language of History shows the complexity and diversity of the subcontinent’s past.]]> 376 Audrey Truschke 0231197055 Aashish 0 4.00
author: Audrey Truschke
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, history
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]]> 40265190
The first book to read these Sanskrit and Persian works in tandem, Culture of Encounters recasts the Mughal Empire as a polyglot polity that collaborated with its Indian subjects to envision its sovereignty. The work also reframes the development of Brahman and Jain communities under Mughal rule, which coalesced around carefully selected, politically salient memories of imperial interaction. Along with its groundbreaking findings, Culture of Encounters certifies the critical role of the sociology of empire in building the Mughal polity, which came to irrevocably shape the literary and ruling cultures of early modern India.]]> 384 Audrey Truschke 0231173636 Aashish 0 0.0 2016
author: Audrey Truschke
name: Aashish
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, history, lit-indic
review:

]]> 671136
Mathematics with Love presents, for the first time, the result of this curious a series of witty, tender and totally accessible introductions to calculus, trigonometry and electrostatic induction that remarkably, wooed and won the girl. Deftly narrated by Barnes and Molly's daughter Mary, Mathematics with Love is an evocative tale of a twenties courtship, a surprising insight into the early life of a World War Two hero, and a great way to learn a little mathematics.]]> 656 John Fauvel 0333427912 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail-not, math 3.60 1987
author: John Fauvel
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, math
review:

]]> 24966135 936 Alexander Mikaberidze 0199951063 Aashish 4 avail, history, lit-western 4.34 2020
author: Alexander Mikaberidze
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: avail, history, lit-western
review:

]]> 13106156
Or you'll get what you wish for.]]> 59 Hugh Howey 1461057205 Aashish 4 specfic-sf, avail 4.04
author: Hugh Howey
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2019/09/01
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: specfic-sf, avail
review:

]]> 239272
But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone - even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action. Will the great man's dangerous pride eventually destroy him?.
(back cover)]]> 197 Chinua Achebe 0141023384 Aashish 4 avail, owned, lit-african 3.77 1958
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: avail, owned, lit-african
review:

]]> 7698501
Written before Achebe was thirty, No Longer at Ease tell the story of Obi Okonowo, a man whose foreign education has separated him from his African roots and made him a part of a ruling elite whose corruption he finds repugnant. The agony of choosing between traditional values and the demands of a changing world is dramatized with unequaled clarity and poignancy. Still relevant more than forty years after it was written, No Longer at Ease remains a brilliant statement of the challenge facing African society.]]> 194 Chinua Achebe 0385667817 Aashish 0 lit-tbr, avail, lit-african 3.69 1960
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: lit-tbr, avail, lit-african
review:

]]> 73973
Living in Ghana’s capital city of Accra with a postgraduate degree and a career in data analysis, Esi Sekyi is a thoroughly modern African woman. Perhaps that is why she decides to divorce her husband after enduring yet another morning’s marital rape. Though her friends and family are baffled by her decision (after all, he doesn’t beat her!), Esi holds fast. When she falls in love with a married man—wealthy, and able to arrange a polygamous marriage—the modern woman finds herself trapped in a new set of problems.

Witty and compelling, Aidoo’s novel, according to Manthia Diawara, “inaugurates a new realist style in African literature.â€� In an afterword to this edition, Tuzyline Jita Allan “places Aidoo’s work in a historical context and helps introduce this remarkable writer [who] sheds light on women’s problems around the globeâ€� ( Publishers Weekly ).]]> 208 Ama Ata Aidoo 1558610650 Aashish 0 3.82 1991
author: Ama Ata Aidoo
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-african, author-not-male
review:

]]> 765618 256 Abdulrazak Gurnah Aashish 0 lit-tbr, avail, lit-african 3.63 1994
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: lit-tbr, avail, lit-african
review:

]]> 46041178 160 Julio CortĂĄzar 0811229459 Aashish 0 3.97 1966
author: Julio CortĂĄzar
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: currently-reading, avail-not, short-stories, translated
review:

]]> 35297410
A revelatory memoir about sex, oppression, and the universal struggle for justice.

From his time as a child in 1960s India, Siddharth Dube knew that he was different. Reckoning with his femininity and sexuality—and his intellect—would send him on a lifelong journey of from Harvard classrooms to unsafe cruising sites; from ivory-tower think-tanks to shantytowns; from halls of power at the UN and World Bank to jail cells where sexual outcasts are brutalized.

Coming of age in the earliest days of AIDS, Dube was at the frontlines when that disease made rights for gay men and for sex workers a matter of basic survival, pushing to decriminalize same-sex relations and sex work in India, both similarly outlawed under laws dating back to British colonial rule. He became a trenchant critic of the United Statesâ€� imposition of its cruel anti-prostitution policies on developing countries—an effort legitimized by leading American feminists and would-be do-gooders—warning that this was a 21st century replay of the moralistic Victorian-era campaigns that had spawned endless persecution of countless women, men, and trans individuals the world over.

Profound, ferocious, and luminously written, An Indefinite Sentence is both a personal and political journey, weaving Dube’s own quest for love and self-respect with unforgettable portrayals of the struggles of some of the world’s most oppressed people, those reviled and cast out for their sexuality. Informed by a lifetime of scholarship and introspection, it is essential reading on the global debates over sexuality, gender expression, and of securing human rights and social justice in a world distorted by inequality and right-wing ascendancy.]]> 384 Siddharth Dube 1501158473 Aashish 0 3.84 2019
author: Siddharth Dube
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer, biographies
review:

]]> 69330649 0 Firdaus Kanga 0685391027 Aashish 0 0.0 1991
author: Firdaus Kanga
name: Aashish
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 36077413 104 Kazim Ali 0819577626 Aashish 0 3.94 2018
author: Kazim Ali
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, poetry, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 15309108
Intimate, thrilling, moving, sometimes even puzzling, but always intriguing, the stories in this anthology bring both the erotic and the queer closer than ever before.]]> 210 Meenu 9381626154 Aashish 0 3.06 2012
author: Meenu
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.06
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 7138508 his years.”—Mark Jude Poirier, author of Goats and Modern Ranch Living Ěý]]> 325 Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla 1593501293 Aashish 0 3.60 2010
author: Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 1202098 Book by 304 Rakesh Ratti 1555831710 Aashish 0 4.09 1993
author: Rakesh Ratti
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 35387487 Whispered into his sister's ears, a confession very shy!
"I think I am a homosexual. I like boys," said he.
"Oh no! Stop thinking, and it will go away," assured she.

Love, heart-break, romance, drama and being queer - this book is a collection of 60 poems (Why 60? Oh, it's just an OCD for even numbers) written by a man who loves another man. Some people might have a problem with that, some people might not. For those who do have a problem, they should read this book precisely to understand the problem. For those who do not, they should read this book because it's dramatic! Now, who doesn't love drama?*wink wink*

So, go ahead, turn the pages, grab a sneak peek, and if you like what's written in here, make this copy your own.]]> 94 Avinash Matta 1947283650 Aashish 0 4.07
author: Avinash Matta
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, poetry, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 6943683 296 Hoshang Merchant 0415484510 Aashish 0 3.30 2008
author: Hoshang Merchant
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 27181334 112 Rajiv Mohabir 1935536729 Aashish 0 4.29 2016
author: Rajiv Mohabir
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, poetry, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 7620166 394 Ruth Vanita 031222169X Aashish 0 4.12 2000
author: Ruth Vanita
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-queer, lit-indic, avail-not, author-not-male, lit-tbr, translated
review:

]]> 2039165 44 Ian Iqbal Rashid 0920661181 Aashish 0 4.50 1991
author: Ian Iqbal Rashid
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer, poetry
review:

]]> 174515645 295 Alka Saraogi Aashish 0 4.00
author: Alka Saraogi
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lang-hindi
review:

]]> 12846205 Ěý
The novel centres around Shivan Rassiah, the beloved grandson, who is of mixed Tamil and Sinhalese lineage, and who also—to his grandmother’s dismay—grows from beautiful boy to striking gay man. As the novel opens in the present day, Shivan, now living in Canada, is preparing to travel back to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to rescue his elderly and ailing grandmother, to remove her from the home—now fallen into disrepair—that is her pride, and bring her to Toronto to live our her final days. But throughout the night and into the early morning hours of his departure, Shivan grapples with his own insatiable hunger and is haunted by unrelenting ghosts of his own creation.
Ěý
The Hungry Ghosts is a beautifully written, dazzling story of family, wealth and the long reach of the past. It shows how racial, political and sexual differences can tear apart both a country and the human heart—not just once, but many times, until the ghosts are fed and freed.]]> 384 Shyam Selvadurai 0385670664 Aashish 0 3.83 2012
author: Shyam Selvadurai
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 1075662 316 Shyam Selvadurai 0140250042 Aashish 5 4.02 1994
author: Shyam Selvadurai
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: lit-queer, lit-indic, avail-not, owned
review:

]]> 302998 The Buddha of Suburbia is one of the most enchanting, provocative, and original books to appear in years.]]> 288 Hanif Kureishi 014013168X Aashish 0 3.77 1990
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: lit-tbr, avail, lit-indic, lit-queer
review:

]]> 53003 216 Jean Genet 1596541369 Aashish 0 4.05 1943
author: Jean Genet
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: lit-tbr, avail, lit-queer, translated
review:

]]> 13112770 Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training is the new expanded version of the book that has been called "the best and most useful of fitness books." It picks up where Starting Strength: A Simple and Practical Guide for Coaching Beginners leaves off. With all new graphics and more than 750 illustrations, a more detailed analysis of the five most important exercises in the weight room, and a new chapter dealing with the most important assistance exercises, Basic Barbell Training offers the most complete examination in print of the most effective way to exercise.]]> 362 Mark Rippetoe 0982522738 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail 4.50 2005
author: Mark Rippetoe
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail
review:

]]> 63211073 This is the ultimate manual for longevity.

For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of ageing that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late, prolonging lifespan at the expense of quality of life. Dr Peter Attia, the world's top longevity expert, believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalised, proactive strategy for longevity.

This isn't 'biohacking,' it's science: a well-founded strategic approach to extending lifespan while improving our physical, cognitive and emotional health, making each decade better than the one before. With Outlive's practical advice and roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.]]> 496 Peter Attia 1785044559 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail, owned 4.29 2023
author: Peter Attia
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail, owned
review:

]]> 53730382
In this book, Joel David Hamkins offers an introduction to the philosophy of mathematics that is grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. He treats philosophical issues as they arise organically in mathematics, discussing such topics as platonism, realism, logicism, structuralism, formalism, infinity, and intuitionism in mathematical contexts. He organizes the book by mathematical themes--numbers, rigor, geometry, proof, computability, incompleteness, and set theory--that give rise again and again to philosophical considerations.]]> 352 Joel David Hamkins 0262542234 Aashish 5 philosophy, math, avail-not 4.41
author: Joel David Hamkins
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.41
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: philosophy, math, avail-not
review:

]]> 6698682 560 Akihiro Kanamori 3540888667 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail-not, math 0.0 2001
author: Akihiro Kanamori
name: Aashish
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, math
review:

]]> 558195 786 Thomas J. Jech 3540440852 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, math, avail-not 4.46 1978
author: Thomas J. Jech
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: nonfic-tbr, math, avail-not
review:

]]> 15648 The Divine Comedy. Featuring the original Italian text opposite the translation, this edition also offers an extensive and accessible introduction and generous commentaries that draw on centuries of scholarship as well as Robert Hollander's own decades of teaching and research. The Hollander translation is the new standard in English of this essential work of world literature.

Librarian's Note: There is an alternate cover edition, available here.]]> 694 Dante Alighieri 0385496982 Aashish 0 avail, lit-tbr, time-0-999 4.20 1320
author: Dante Alighieri
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1320
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: avail, lit-tbr, time-0-999
review:

]]> 22584
When he finally found a man who would agree to counterfeiting such cards for him, that man turned out to be a police informer. And then Taverner found out not only what it was like to be a nobody but also to be hunted by the whole apparatus of society.

It was obvious that in some way Taverner had become the pea in in some sort of cosmic shell game—but how? And why?

Philip K. Dick takes the reader on a walking tour of solipsism's scariest margin in his latest novel about the age we are already half into.]]> 204 Philip K. Dick 1857983416 Aashish 0 3.93 1974
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: specfic-sf, avail, currently-reading
review:

]]> 39889957
In the hilarious satire Vishnu Sharma Learns English, a Telugu lecturer is visited in a dream by the medieval poet Tikanna and the ancient scholar Vishnu Sharma with an unusual request: they want him to teach them English!

Velcheru Narayana Rao's elegant translation is accompanied by an erudite introduction and afterword which illuminate the fascinating life and works of Viswanadha Satyanarayana.]]> 250 Viswanatha Satyanarayana 0143426222 Aashish 0 3.94 1952
author: Viswanatha Satyanarayana
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: lit-tbr, avail-not, owned, translated, lit-indic
review:

]]> 642231
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to prove that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon’s fall.

Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.]]> 259 Daniel Kehlmann 0375424466 Aashish 2 3.79 2005
author: Daniel Kehlmann
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: avail, translated, lit-western, lang-german, lang-european-modern, owned
review:

]]> 484458 128 Donald Ervin Knuth 0201038129 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail-not, stem 3.87 1974
author: Donald Ervin Knuth
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, stem
review:

]]> 32336635 384 Hugo Mercier 0674368304 Aashish 0 4.13 2017
author: Hugo Mercier
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail, philosophy, psych-socio
review:

]]> 665134 352 BenoĂŽt B. Mandelbrot 0465043550 Aashish 0 4.07 1997
author: BenoĂŽt B. Mandelbrot
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail, politics-econ-ir-etc
review:

]]> 6372440 This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned.


Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur.


An important book that will affect policy discussions for a long time to come, This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.]]> 460 Carmen M. Reinhart 0691142165 Aashish 0 3.77 2009
author: Carmen M. Reinhart
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, politics-econ-ir-etc
review:

]]> 179198 368 Peter L. Bernstein 0471731749 Aashish 0 3.97 1991
author: Peter L. Bernstein
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, politics-econ-ir-etc
review:

]]> 145565 256 Warren Buffett 0966446119 Aashish 0 4.28 1998
author: Warren Buffett
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail, anthology-collection, politics-econ-ir-etc
review:

]]> 860389 308 Vikram Seth 0571200389 Aashish 0 4.04 1986
author: Vikram Seth
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: currently-reading, avail-not, poetry, owned, lit-indic
review:

]]> 77532
The stories are:

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut"
"Just Before the War with the Eskimos"
"The Laughing Man"
"Down at the Dinghy"
"For EsmÊ � with Love and Squalor"
"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes"
"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period"
"Teddy"]]> 198 J.D. Salinger 0316769509 Aashish 0 4.12 1953
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: currently-reading, avail, short-stories, anthology-collection, owned
review:

]]> 13707734
Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book—the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age—fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.]]> 356 Stephen Greenblatt 0393343405 Aashish 0 3.88 2011
author: Stephen Greenblatt
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail, history, lit-western
review:

]]> 59073557 528 Manu S. Pillai 9391165893 Aashish 0 3.73
author: Manu S. Pillai
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.73
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, lit-indic, history
review:

]]> 221571952
But then, European power began to grow in India, and under colonial rule, missionaries assumed a forbidding appearance. During the British Raj, Western frames of thinking gained ascendancy and Hindus felt pressed to reimagine their religion. This was both to fortify it against Christian attacks and to resist foreign rule. It is this encounter which has, in good measure, inspired modern Hinduism’s present shape. Indeed, Hindus subverted some of the missionariesâ€� own tools and strategies in the process, triggering the birth of Hindu nationalism, now so dominant in the country.

In Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu S. Pillai takes us through these remarkable dynamics. With an arresting cast of characters—maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen—this book is ambitious in its scope and provocative in its position. Lucid and exhaustive, it is, at once, a political history, a review of Hindu culture and a study of the social forces that prepared the ground for Hindu nationalism. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated—and infinitely richer—than popular narratives allow.]]> 564 Manu Pillai 0670093653 Aashish 0 3.71
author: Manu Pillai
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, history, lit-indic
review:

]]> 214852155 Using Persian, English, and hitherto untranslated French sources as well as recent work by art historians, bestselling author Ira Mukhoty brings to focus the life and times of Awadh in the eighteenth century as well as some of the most important figures of the period—the nawabs, EIC officials such as Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, Richard Wellesley, as also the powerful begums, elite eunuchs, soldiers and adventurers, such as René Madec, Jean Baptiste Gentil, Claude Martin, Antoine Polier, artists both Indian and European, and others. The Lion and the Lily is a nuanced, detailed, and richly told account of the rise and fall of Awadh in the eighteenth century against the background of the international struggle between Britain and France.]]> 0 Ira Mukhoty 8119635442 Aashish 0 4.47
author: Ira Mukhoty
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: nonfic-tbr, lit-indic, avail-not, history
review:

]]> 57366745 Rajpal and Sons 370 Shripad Damodar Satvlekar 9389373425 Aashish 0 4.44 2013
author: Shripad Damodar Satvlekar
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: avail-not, lit-indic, nonfic-tbr
review:

]]> 3703990 224 Mark Steiner 067404097X Aashish 0 4.15 1998
author: Mark Steiner
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: nonfic-tbr, avail-not, philosophy
review:

]]> 32889394
Mathematics is one of humanity's most successful yet puzzling endeavors. It is a model of precision and objectivity, but appears distinct from the empirical sciences because it seems to deliver nonexperiential knowledge of a nonphysical reality of numbers, sets, and functions. How can these two aspects of mathematics be reconciled? This concise book provides a systematic yet accessible introduction to the field that is trying to answer that the philosophy of mathematics.

Written by Øystein Linnebo, one of the world's leading scholars on the subject, the book introduces all of the classical approaches to the field, including logicism, formalism, intuitionism, empiricism, and structuralism. It also contains accessible introductions to some more specialized issues, such as mathematical intuition, potential infinity, the iterative conception of sets, and the search for new mathematical axioms. The groundbreaking work of German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, figures prominently throughout the book. Other important thinkers whose work is introduced and discussed include Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, David Hilbert, Kurt GÜdel, W. V. Quine, Paul Benacerraf, and Hartry H. Field.

Sophisticated but clear and approachable, this is an essential introduction for all students and teachers of philosophy, as well as mathematicians and others who want to understand the foundations of mathematics.]]> 216 Øystein Linnebo 0691161402 Aashish 0 3.84
author: Øystein Linnebo
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.84
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]]> 1102226
This sweeping introductory guide to the philosophy of mathematics makes these fascinating concepts accessible to those with little background in either mathematics or philosophy.]]> 328 Stewart Shapiro 0192893068 Aashish 0 4.03 2000
author: Stewart Shapiro
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2000
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]]> 32025425 How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalism

During and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system. Without using the term "globalization," they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a "globalist" ideology to reflect this new postwar reality. The Emergence of Globalism examines the competing visions of world order that shaped these debates and led to the development of globalism as a modern political concept.

Shedding critical light on this neglected chapter in the history of political thought, Or Rosenboim describes how a transnational network of globalist thinkers emerged from the traumas of war and expatriation in the 1940s and how their ideas drew widely from political philosophy, geopolitics, economics, imperial thought, constitutional law, theology, and philosophy of science. She presents compelling portraits of Raymond Aron, Owen Lattimore, Lionel Robbins, Barbara Wootton, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Curtis, Richard McKeon, Michael Polanyi, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. G. Wells, and others. Rosenboim shows how the globalist debate they embarked on sought to balance the tensions between a growing recognition of pluralism on the one hand and an appreciation of the unity of humankind on the other.

An engaging look at the ideas that have shaped today's world, The Emergence of Globalism is a major work of intellectual history that is certain to fundamentally transform our understanding of the globalist ideal and its origins.]]> 352 Or Rosenboim 0691168725 Aashish 0 4.00
author: Or Rosenboim
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]]> 3828902 Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.

Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.

While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.

In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.]]> 218 Donella H. Meadows 1603580557 Aashish 0 nonfic-tbr, avail 4.17 2008
author: Donella H. Meadows
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2008
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]]> 34459 The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.

In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.]]> 276 George Lakoff 0226468011 Aashish 0 4.10 1980
author: George Lakoff
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1980
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]]> 10641262 368 Geoffrey M. Hodgson 0203025717 Aashish 0 3.43 1998
author: Geoffrey M. Hodgson
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> 16284953 480 Philip Mirowski 1781680795 Aashish 0 4.15 2013
author: Philip Mirowski
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 13831216 445 Mary Susanna Morgan 1107002974 Aashish 0 3.76 2012
author: Mary Susanna Morgan
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2012
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]]> 10813320
Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.]]> 434 Francis Spufford 0571225241 Aashish 0 4.02 2010
author: Francis Spufford
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2010
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]]> 33591175 Via an unprecedented analysis of management texts which influenced the thinking of employers and contributed to reorganization of companies over the last decades, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. From the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization which was founded on employee initiative and relative work autonomy, but at the cost of material and psychological security.
This new spirit of capitalism triumphed thanks to a remarkable recuperation of the "artistic critique"--that which, after May 1968, attacked the alienation of everyday life by capitalism and bureaucracy. At the same time, the "social critique" was disarmed by the appearance of neocapitalism and remained fixated on the old schemas of hierarchical production.
This book, remarkable for its scope and ambition, seeks to lay the basis for a revival of these two complementary critiques.]]> 656 Luc Boltanski Aashish 0 4.07 1999
author: Luc Boltanski
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1999
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]]> 350549 180 Albert O. Hirschman 0691015988 Aashish 0 4.19 1977
author: Albert O. Hirschman
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1977
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]]> 6617037 Before there was money, there was debt.

Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religionĚý(words like “guilt,â€� “sin,â€� and “redemptionâ€�) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.]]> 534 David Graeber 1933633867 Aashish 0 4.21 2011
author: David Graeber
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2011
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]]> 349990 184 Marcel Mauss 039332043X Aashish 0 3.94 1923
author: Marcel Mauss
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1923
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]]> 435817 272 Max Weber 041525406X Aashish 0 3.75 1904
author: Max Weber
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1904
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]]> 1097793 188 Edward Hallett Carr 0140135847 Aashish 0 3.85 1961
author: Edward Hallett Carr
name: Aashish
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1961
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]]> 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 292 John Williams 1590171993 Aashish 0 lit-tbr, avail, lit-western 4.35 1965
author: John Williams
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1965
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]]> 59839608 162 Kazim Ali 9353576164 Aashish 0 4.00
author: Kazim Ali
name: Aashish
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]]> 1320190 876 Jonathan D. Spence 0393027082 Aashish 5 history, avail, lit-chinese 4.30 1990
author: Jonathan D. Spence
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: history, avail, lit-chinese
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]]> 41728446 'Reminds us that the mind is the greatest mystery in the universe' Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian, Books of the Year

Could psychedelic drugs change our worldview? Join Michael Pollan on a journey to the frontiers of the human mind.

Diving deep into an extraordinary world - from shamans and magic mushroom hunts to the pioneering labs mapping our brains - and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of consciousness.

'A sweeping and often thrilling chronicle of the history of psychedelics, all interwoven with Pollan's adventures as a psychedelic novice. This is a serious work of history and science, but also one in which the author, under the influence of toad venom, becomes convinced he's giving birth to himself' Oliver Burkeman, Guardian

'A mind-altering book ... full of transformations' Richard Godwin, Evening Standard

'An irresistible blend of history, research and personal experience. In terms of the psychedelic wave, the book is the big kahuna, the Big Bang moment for a movement that is gathering force' John McKenna, Irish Times

'Entertaining and engrossing' Paul Laity, Financial Times

'Deeply absorbing, wise and beautifully written' Mick Brown, Literary Review

'An astounding book' Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine]]> 480 Michael Pollan 0141985135 Aashish 0 4.40 2018
author: Michael Pollan
name: Aashish
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2018
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]]>