You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Book 6 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. The Stolen Light engages with the particular difficulties of Mehta's experience: he was blind in a college made for the seeing, he was an Indian in the United States, a Hindu in a Christian environment, a dark-skinned man surrounded by white people. With compelling honesty and humour, Mehta describes his struggles to live an ordinary university life - dating, riding a bicycle, keeping up with his studies - while dealing with incredible obstacles.
Unsurpassed as a prose stylist, Ved Mehta is an acknowledged master of the essay form. In this book—the first special collection of Mehta’s outstanding writing—the distinguished author demonstrates a wide range of possibilities available to the narrative and descriptive writer today. Addressing subjects that range from religion to politics and on to education, and writing with eloquence and high style, Mehta here offers a sampling of his works. Mehta provides a splendid, insightful introduction on the craft of the essay, meditating on the long history and diverse purposes of the form and on the struggle of learning to write in it himself. In the eight reportorial, autobiographical, and reflective essays that follow—each a self-contained examination of cultural, intellectual, or personal themes—he writes on his experience of becoming an American citizen; on Christian theology, with a focus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer; on Calcutta and the poorest of the Indian poor; on the disastrous fates of three of Mehta’s brilliant Oxford contemporaries; and on a variety of other subjects.
There can seldom have been a more unpromising subject for a film or a book than Chachaji, and yet he became the hero of a celebrated documentary film, CHACHAJI, MY POOR RELATION: A MEMOIR BY VED MEHTA. He also became the hero of this book, which is, among other things, an account of the making of that film. Indeed, he has become, in a sense, a metaphor for the whole of India in all its splendid contradictions. Mr. Mehta and an Anglo-American filming team—led by a Tasmanian-born Canadian producer—travelled to India, where they were soon joined by the producer’s wife, a great-great-grandniece of William Wordsworth. The team spent a month filming Chachaji, an eighty-three-year-old man who...
Blind since the age of four, Ved Mehta led a lonely and turbulent childhood in India until he was accepted to the Arkansas School for the Blind, to which he flew alone at fifteen. America and the school changed his life, leading to degrees at Oxford and Harvard Universities and a fruitful writing career. Face to Face (1957), Mehta’s first book, is the author’s autobiography touching upon childhood, blindness and remaking himself. It remains one of his most beloved works.
Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. After studying in the United States, Mehta - blind since childhood - achieves his dream of enrolling at the University of Oxford: a place that has consumed his imagination ever since he was a small boy growing up under the British Raj. In Up at Oxford, Mehta recalls the nuances of his conversations, the range of his youthful emotions, and the sounds, smells, and tastes of university life. Along the way he draws memorable portraits of, among others, novelists, poets, scholars, and peers.
Ved Mehta's brilliant Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles provides an unparalleled portrait of the man who lead India out of its colonial past and into its modern form. Travelling all over India and the rest of the world, Mehta gives a nuanced and complex, yet vividly alive, portrait of Gandhi and of those men and women who were inspired by his actions.
Book 10 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. In lucid, sparse prose Mehta documents the twists and turns of a romantic history peppered with disappointment and anguish - that is until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way toward new insights about himself and those he has loved.
For more than three decades, a quiet man—some would say almost an invisible man—dwelt at the center of American journalistic and literary life. He was William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. Through the writers and artists he gathered around him and worked with, the forms of writing he invented, the pieces he encouraged and published, and his gentle but meticulous editing of those pieces, he expanded—permanently—the range of the possible in journalistic and literary writing. Among his writers were Edmund Wilson, Rachel Carson, John Cheever, V. S. Pritchett, J. D. Salinger, Penelope Mortimer, A. J. Liebling, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Jonathan Schel...
Ved Mehta’s acclaimed Continents of Exile series ends where it began—with a portrait of his father, Amolak Ram Mehta. But this, the final instalment of the eleven-book series, which has been appearing over the last thirty-two years, is its emotional crescendo, the story of the author’s discovery of his father’s affair with a married woman in the British India of the 1930s. The story has its origins in the 1960s, when Mehta by chance finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother’s shoulder during a New York dinner party. As a result, the son begins to unravel a family mystery that takes him on a painful and revealing voyage into his father’s British past in Simla, the magi...