SikhSpectrum.com Quarterly Issue No.18, November 2004
SikhSpectrum.com Winter Book List
With winter holidays coming up, take a break from your hectic schedule and enjoy a good book. From art or adventure, to politics and philosophy, here are a few of our favorites. Enjoy! -- Editorial Team
"While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, a baffling cipher found near the body. As Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci - clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.
The stakes are raised when Langdon uncovers a startling link: The late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion - an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others. Langdon suspects they are on the hunt for a breakthrough historical secret, one that has proven through the centuries to be as enlightening as it is dangerous. In a frantic race through Paris, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu find themselves matching wits with a faceless powerbroker who appears to anticipate their every move. Unless they can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle, the Priory's secret - and an explosive ancient truth - will be lost forever."
The Alchemist
"Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. Paulo Coelho's, The Alchemist is such a book. Since its original publication in 1988, the book has sold millions of copies throughout the world.
The Alchemist involves the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who travels in search of a worldly treasure. From his home in Spain, he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist. The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams."
City of Djinns
"When he was seventeen, William Dalrymple visited Delhi and was transfixed by this ancient city's multiple layers of history, myth, and legend. Five years after his first trip he returned, this time newly married, to record his fascination on paper.
In City of Djinns, Dalrymple peels back the layers of Delhi's long history. He revisits its seven "dead" cities and the eighth city - today's Delhi - where multiple ages commingle in a mélange of bygone and current cultures. Underlying his quest is the legend of the djinns, fire-formed spirits that are said to assure Delhi's regeneration no matter how many times the city is destroyed. With wit, open-mindedness, and guileless curiosity, Dalrymple reveals the kaleidoscopic variety of a city that moves forward in the midst of its past."
Angels & Demons
"Critics have praised the exhilarating blend of relentless adventure, scholarly intrigue, and cutting wit found in Brown's remarkable thrillers featuring Robert Langdon. An explosive international suspense, Angels & Demons marks this hero's first adventure as it careens from enlightening epiphanies to dark truths as the battle between science and religion turns to war."
Embarking on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and the most secretive vault on earth, Langdon and [Italian scientist] Vittoria Vetra follow a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome toward the long-forgotten Illuminati lair...a clandestine location that contains the only hope for Vatican salvation."
What The Body Remembers
"In 1937, and with her father in debt, motherless 16-year-old Roop learns she is to become the second wife of Sardarji, a wealthy Sikh landowner whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him a child. Roop belives that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister, but their relationship swiftly becomes ominous and complicated. What The Body Remembers is also Satya's story. Mortified when Sardarji marries Roop, Satya resorts to desperate measures to maintain her place in society and her husband's heart.
Sardarji himself struggles as the India he knows begins to change as separatist tensions between Hindus and Muslims trap the Sikhs in a horrifying middle ground, and the departing British prepare to divide the land into India and Pakistan."
The History of Western Philosophy
"Since its first publication in 1945, Lord Russell's, A History of Western Philosophy has been universally acclaimed as the outstanding one-volume work on the subject - unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, its clarity, its erudition, its grace and wit. In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the 20th century.
Among the philosophers considered are: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and lastly the philosophers with whom Lord Russell himself is most closely associated - Cantor, Frege, and Whitehead, co-author with Russell of the monumental Principia Mathematica."
Gardens of Persia
"Gardens of Persia is the first book to explore the evolution of the Persian paradise garden from its ancient beginnings to today's modern designs. Buildings, water and plants combine to give the gardens of Persia a beauty and a spiritual quality, which have inspired garden design throughout time, and in diverse cultures.
World-renowned author Penelope Hobhouse begins with the oldest existing garden, Pasargadae, created by Cyrus the Great more than 2,500 years ago. It represented paradise on earth - an enclosed four-fold layout providing shade, vegetation and refuge. With the coming of Islam, gardens became places for sacred contemplation and spiritual nourishment, and developed in later centuries as settings for romance and, in Mughal India, as representations of power and prestige as well as symbols of the afterlife. Hobhouse links the development of these gardens to Persia's great heritage and breathtaking historical architecture, and to their relationship to the 21st century as she writes, 'Today's gardneners seeking to create secluded havens as antidotes to the bustle of modern life are following a tradition that began in Persia."
Wittgeinstein's Poker
"If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men." - Karl Popper.
"Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business." - Ludwig Wittgenstein.
On October 25, 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face-to-face for the first and only time. The encounter lasted just ten minutes and did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend…Twenty years later when Popper wrote an account of the incident, he portrayed himself as the victor, provoking intense disagreement. What really happened in those ten minutes? What does the violence of this brief exchange tell us about these two men, modern philosophy, and the significance of language in solving our philosophical problems?"
New Priorities in South Asia: U.S. Policy Toward India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
"This Chairmen's Report of an Independent Task Force co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations assesses the strengths and weaknesses of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and recommends how U.S. Policy can best take advantage of the opportunities while addressing the dangers that they present. The report urges new initiatives to solidify the partnership with an economically and militarily stronger India; carefully calibrated support for Pakistan in its efforts to become a moderate Muslim state; a more active, facilitative U.S. role in the volatile Kashmir conflict; a new framework for - and a close watch on - proliferation issues in the region; and redoubled support for the Hamid Karzai government's security initiatives in Afghanistan.
The Task Force - chaired by former U.S. Ambassador to India Frank G. Wisner II, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Nicholas Platt, and President of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Marshall M. Bouton - benefited from the expertise in government, business and finance, the law, and academia."
George Soros - The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire
"The first biography of George Soros written with his cooperation - the story of the capitalist genius who has become the leading philanthropist of our time. Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, he was on his own by age fourteen, passing as a non-Jew to survive World War II. In London, at seventeen, penniless but no longer forced to live in disguise, he dreamed both of personal glory and of working to make the world less harsh. Ambition and opportunity drove him to Wall Street, where he arrived in 1956 with five thousand dollars. He became a maverick trader, inventing novel approaches, and soon he was known as 'the greatest money manager in the world'. His 'Quantam Fund' set the standard for hedge funds, and the details of how he amassed his wealth, on his own and so quickly, are fascinating.
We see him invest more than a billion dollars through his global network of Open Society foundations in an attempt to undermine the kind of totalitarianism he knew in his youth and to enhance democracy and liberty. Through his largely unpublicized projects he became a key figure in the collapse of Communism while helping to minimize the trauma of transition.
In the process, he has had greater impact on politics in more countries than any other private citizen in the world."
My Feudal Lord
"Born into Pakistan's most influential families, Tehmina Durrani was raised in the privileged milieu of Lahore high society. Like all women of her rank she was expected to marry a prosperous Muslim from a respectable family, bear him many children, and lead a sheltered life of leisure. Her marriage to Mustafa Khar, one of Pakistan's most eminent political figures, soon turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, Mustafa Khar succeeded in cutting her off from the outside world. For fourteen years, Tehmina suffered alone, in silence.
When this book was first published it shook Pakistani society to its foundations. Here at last, was someone who had succeeded in reconciling her faith in Islam with her ardent belief in women's rights."
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