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› Find signed collectible books: 'Advanced Techniques for Assessment Surface Topology: Development of a Basis for 3d Surface Texture Standards Surfstand'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth'
Gandhi's nonviolent struggles in South Africa and India had already brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation, and controversy that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself. Although accepting of his status as a great innovator in the struggle against racism, violence, and, just then, colonialism, Gandhi feared that enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding. He says that he was after truth rooted in devotion to God and attributed the turning points, successes, and challenges in his life to the will of God. His attempts to get closer to this divine power led him to seek purity through simple living, dietary practices (he called himself a fruitarian), celibacy, and ahimsa, a life without violence. It is in this sense that he calls his book The Story of My Experiments with Truth, offering it also as a reference for those who would follow in his footsteps. A reader expecting a complete accounting of his actions, however, will be sorely disappointed.
Although Gandhi presents his episodes chronologically, he happily leaves wide gaps, such as the entire satyagraha struggle in South Africa, for which he refers the reader to another of his books. And writing for his contemporaries, he takes it for granted that the reader is familiar with the major events of his life and of the political milieu of early 20th-century India. For the objective story, try Yogesh Chadha's Gandhi: A Life. For the inner world of a man held as a criminal by the British, a hero by Muslims, and a holy man by Hindus, look no further than these experiments. --Brian Bruya [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Autobiography: Or the Story of My Experiments With Truth'
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Western India in 1869. He was educated in London and later travelled to South Africa, where he experienced racism and took up the rights of Indians, instituting his first campaign of passive resistance. In 1915 he returned to British-controlled India, bringing to a country in the throes of independence his commitment to non-violent change, and his belief always in the power of truth. Under Gandhi's lead, millions of protesters would engage in mass campaigns of civil disobedience, seeking change through ahimsa or non-violence. For Gandhi, the long path towards Indian independence would lead to imprisonment and hardship, yet he never once forgot the principles of truth and non-violence so dear to him. Written in the 1920s, Gandhi's autobiography tells of his struggles and his inspirations; a powerful and enduring statement of an extraordinary life. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bhowani Junction'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bugles and a Tiger: A Volume of Autobiography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Calcutta'
Classic history of the Victorian seat of the British Raj, setting for the notorious Black Hole where 2 score English settlers diedin an 18th century uprising, and today the 4th largest city in the world. Kipling called it the city of dreadful night - a city of unspeakable poverty, of famine, riot and disease. Yet Calcutta, once the seat of the Raj, is the 2nd city in the commonwealth, the 4th city in the world. Geoffrey Moorhouse's history come travel book, 1st published by Wiedenfeld & Nicolson in 1971, remains the classic account. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Children of Kali: Through India in Search of Bandits, the Thug Cult, and the British Raj'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Confessions of a Thug'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Confessions of a Thug'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Corrosion Tests And Standards: Application And Interpretation'
This volume provides guidelines for recognizing types of corrosion as well as the fundamentals of corrosion testing. The technical quality and value of this manual is the result of the efforts of over 400 experts in the field of corrosion testing and evaluation. Sections cover: General Information; Testing and Evaluation; Types of Tests; Testing for Corrosion Types; Testing in Environments; Materials Testing; Testing in Industries; Cross Referencing for finding comparable standards by various organizations such as ASTM, AFNOR, DIN, BSI, NACE, USCAP, ISO, AND IEC. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Day of the Scorpion: A Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Day of the Scorpion'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Deceivers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Division of the Spoils: A Novel'
The great war is over, and India--the jewel in the British crown--has been deemed worthless: a bauble to be tossed to the winds. A colonial policeman corrupted by ambition, power, and hatred goes to shocking extremes of cruelty to perpetuate a disappearing way of life. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'E.M. Forster: A Passage to India'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Far Pavilions'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gandhi's Autobiography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heat and Dust'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Jewel in the Crown'
"Ah no, waste no pity on young Kumar. Whatever he got while in the hands of the police he deserved. And waste no pity on her either. She also got what she deserved."
August 1942. World War II is reaching its apex, with the conflict consuming almost all of Asia and Europe. In Southeast Asia, the Japanese have driven the British army out of Burma and are threatening India, where Britain's beleaguered forces find themselves facing an increasingly hostile Indian populace tired of decades of unfulfilled promises of freedom. On a dark monsoonal night in the town of Mayapore, amid an outbreak of anti-British rioting, a gang of Indian men rape a young British woman. Through this rape, we are introduced to a cast of characters engulfed and subsequently carried away by the storm of events. Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown is part historical novel, part mystery, part love story, part allegory. But to reduce it to any of these elements is to miss its irony, poignancy, and beauty. Full of complex characters and rich in atmosphere and symbolism, this is a novel that works on many different levels.
The events unfold through the eyes of a varied cast of characters--both British and Indian--united by their inability to escape the straightjacket of race and social roles, no matter their class, education, or political views. This is particularly excruciating for the rape victim and the young Indian man accused of the crime. These two are drawn to each other by their alienation from the roles they are expected to play. Englishwoman Daphne Manners finds herself increasingly estranged from her countrymen, while Hari Kumar, an Indian who has lived in Britain for all but two years of his life and is so anglicized that he doesn't even speak Hindi, can't abide his native land. Their struggle with the identities and constraints that society imposes on them and the manifestations of their conflict form the core of the novel, providing the timelessness and richness that make it one of the great novels of the 20th century.
The Jewel in the Crown, originally published in 1966, is the first of the Raj Quartet, the sweeping epic that looks at the collapse in the 1940s of British rule in India. It was followed by The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of Spoils. --Jonathan King [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Jungle Book II'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kim'
1901. Kipling, English short-story writer, novelist and poet, who celebrated the heroism of British colonial soldiers in India and Burma, was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Kim is his picaresque novel of India and is considered to be a masterpiece. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kim'
One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:
Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'"
In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kingof the Khyber Rifles'
Talbot Mundy ranks with Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard as a master of exotic adventure. Our young hero Athelston King of the India Secret Service, is dispatched to the Khyber Pass to prevent what threatens to become a Holy War. He is assigned a partner, Yasmini the Wonderful, who holds the mysteries of the mountains in the hollow of her hand...." [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lives of the Indian Princes'
This book on the picturesque lifestyle of the erstwhile Indian princes and maharajas is now available in a revised Indian edition. The princes may have become mere citizens but the enchantment remains [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Midnight's Children'
Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:
I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.
We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nightrunners of Bengal'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'North-west Frontier 1837-1947'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Old Filth'
FILTH is a lawyer with a practice in the Far East. A few remember that his nickname stands for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. But Old Filth is not as pompous as people imagine, and his past contains many secrets and dark hiding places. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Palace Tiger'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Passage to India: Library Edition'
What really happened in the Marabar caves? This is the mystery at the heart of E.M. Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India, the puzzle that sets in motion events highlighting an even larger question: Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends?
"It is impossible here," an Indian character tells his friend, Dr. Aziz, early in the novel.
"They come out intending to be gentlemen, and are told it will not do.... Why, I remember when Turton came out first. It was in another part of the Province. You fellows will not believe me, but I have driven with Turton in his carriage--Turton! Oh yes, we were once quite intimate. He has shown me his stamp collection.Written while England was still firmly in control of India, Forster's novel follows the fortunes of three English newcomers to India--Miss Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Cyril Fielding--and the Indian, Dr. Aziz, with whom they cross destinies. The idea of true friendship between the races was a radical one in Forster's time, and he makes it abundantly clear that it was not one that either side welcomed. If Aziz's friend, Hamidullah, believed it impossible, the British representatives of the Raj were equally discouraging."He would expect you to steal it now. Turton! But red-nosed boy will be far worse than Turton!
"I do not think so. They all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike."
"Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die," said Mrs. Callendar.Despite their countrymen's disapproval, Miss Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Fielding are all eager to meet Indians, and in Dr. Aziz they find a perfect companion: educated, westernized, and open-minded. Slowly, the friendships ripen, especially between Aziz and Fielding. Having created the possibility of esteem based on trust and mutual affection, Forster then subjects it to the crucible of racial hatred: during a visit to the famed Marabar caves, Miss Quested accuses Dr. Aziz of sexually assaulting her, then later recants during the frenzied trial that follows. Under such circumstances, affection proves to be a very fragile commodity indeed.
"How if he went to heaven?" asked Mrs. Moore, with a gentle but crooked smile.
"He can go where he likes as long as he doesn't come near me. They give me the creeps."
Arguably Forster's greatest novel, A Passage to India limns a troubling portrait of colonialism at its worst, and is remarkable for the complexity of its characters. Here the personal becomes the political and in the breach between Aziz and his English "friends," Forster foreshadows the eventual end of the Raj. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Plain Tales from the Raj'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Princess Remembers: Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur'
She is the daughter of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the widow of the Maharaja of Jaipur. She was raised in a sumptuous palace staffed with 500 servants and she shot her first panther when she was twelve. She has appeared on the lists of the world's most beautiful women. Gayatri Devi describes her carefree tomboy childhood; her secret six-year courtship with the dashing, internationally renowned polo player, Jai the Maharaja of Jaipur; and her marriage and entrance into the City Palace of the 'pink city' where she had to adjust to unfamiliar customs and life with his two wives. Jai's liberating influence, combined with Gayatri Devi's own strong character, took her well beyond the traditionally limited activities of a Maharani. This is an intimate look at the extraordinary life of one of the world's most fascinating women and an informal history of the princely states of India, from the height of the princes' power to their present state of de-recognition. Maharani Gayatri Devi was the last Queen of Jaipur in Rajasthan. Gayatri Devi was listed in Vogue as one of the most beautiful women in the world. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Raj: A Novel'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Raj Quartet'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ravi Lancers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Second Jungle Book'
"For this reason," the Lone Wolf answered: "when that yellow chief's hide was hung up on the rock, I went back along our trail to the village, stepping in my tracks, turning aside, and lying down, to make a mixed trail in case one should follow us. But when I had fouled the trail so that I myself hardly knew it again, Mang, the Bat, came hawking between the trees, and hung up above me. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush'
For more than a decade following the end of World War II, Eric Newby toiled away in the British fashion industry, peddling some of the ugliest clothes on the planet. (Regarding one wafer-thin model in her runway best, he was reminded of "those flagpoles they put up in the Mall when the Queen comes home.") Fortunately, Newby reached the end his haute-couture tether in 1956. At that point, with the sort of sublime impulsiveness that's forbidden to fictional characters but endemic to real ones, he decided to visit a remote corner of Afghanistan, where no Englishman had planted his brogans for at least 50 years. What's more, he recorded his adventure in a classic narrative, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. The title, of course, is a fine example of Newby's habitual self-effacement, since his journey--which included a near-ascent of the 19,800-foot Mir Samir--was anything but short. And his book seems to furnish a missing link between the great Britannic wanderers of the Victorian era and such contemporary jungle nuts as Redmond O'Hanlon.
At times it also brings to mind Evelyn Waugh, who contributed the preface. Newby is a less acidulous writer, to be sure, and he has little interest in launching the sort of heat-seeking satiric missiles that were Waugh's specialty. Still, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a hilarious read. The author excels at the dispiriting snapshot, capturing, say, the Afghan backwater of Fariman in two crisp sentences: "A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted." His capsule history of Nuristan also gets in some sly digs at Britain's special relationship with the violence-prone Abdur Rahman:
Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000 to 16,000 lakhs of rupees. To the British he had fully justified their selection of him as Amir of Afghanistan and, apart from the few foibles remarked by Lord Curzon, like flaying people alive who displeased him, blowing them from the mouths of cannon, or standing them up to the neck in pools of water on the summits of high mountains and letting them freeze solid, he had done nothing to which exception could be taken.Newby also surpasses Waugh--and indeed, most other travel writers--in another important respect: he's miraculously free of solipsism. Even the keenest literary voyagers tend to be, in the purest sense of the term, self-centered. But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush includes wonderfully oblique portraits of the author's travel companion, Hugh Carless, and his wife, Wanda (who plays a starring role in such subsequent chronicles as Slowly down the Ganges). There are also dozens of brilliant cameo parts, and an indelible record of a stunning landscape. The roof of the world is, in Newby's rendering, both an absolute heaven and a low-oxygen hell. Yet the author never pretends to pit himself against a malicious Nature--his mountains are, in Frost's memorable phrase, too lofty and original to rage. Which is yet another reason to call this little masterpiece a peak performance. --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Siege of Krishnapur'
"The first sign of trouble at Krishnapur came with a mysterious distribution of chapatis, made of coarse flour and about the size and thickness of a biscuit; towards the end of February 1857, they swept the countryside like an epidemic."Students of history will recognise 1857 as the year of the Sepoy rebellion in India--an uprising of native soldiers against the British, brought on by Hindu and Muslim recruits' belief that the rifle cartridges with which they were provided had been greased with pig or cow fat. This seminal event in Anglo-Indian relations provides the backdrop for J.G. Farrell's Booker Prize- winning exploration of race, culture and class, The Siege of Krishnapur.
Like the mysteriously appearing chapatis, life in British India seems, on the surface, innocuous enough. Farrell introduces us gradually to a large cast of characters as he paints a vivid portrait of the Victorians' daily routines that are accompanied by heat, boredom, class-consciousness and the pursuit of genteel pastimes intended for cooler climates. Even the siege begins slowly, with disquieting news of massacres in cities far away. When Krishnapur itself is finally attacked, the Europeans withdraw inside the grounds of the Residency where very soon conditions begin to deteriorate: food and water run out, disease is rampant, people begin to go a little mad. Soon the very proper British are reduced to eating insects and consorting across class lines. Farrell's descriptions of life inside the Residency are simultaneously horrifying and blackly humorous. The siege, for example, is conducted under the avid eyes of the local populace, who clearly anticipate an enjoyable massacre and thus arrive every morning laden with picnic lunches (plainly visible to the starving Europeans). By turns witty and compassionate, The Siege of Krishnapur comprises the best of all fictional worlds: unforgettable characters, an epic adventure and at its heart a cultural clash for the ages. --Alix Wilber [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Soldier Sahibs: The Daring Adventurers Who Tamed India's Northwest Frontier'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stalky & Co'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Stalky And Company'
In the infinitely petty confederacies of the Common-room, King and Macrea, fellow house-masters, had borne it in upon him that by games, and games alone, was salvation wrought. Boys neglected were boys lost. They must be disciplined. Left to himself, Prout would have made a sympathetic house-master; but he was never so left, and with the devilish insight of youth, the boys knew to whom they were indebted for his zeal. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia'
Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, the Russian and British Empires played out a chess game of diplomacy, espionage, and military thrusts into Central Asia to protect their expanding interests. When play began, the frontiers of their empires lay 2,000 miles apart, across vast deserts and almost impassable mountain ranges; by the end, they were separated by only 20 miles. Karl E. Meyer of The New York Times and Shareen Blair Brysac, documentary filmmaker for CBS, update and significantly expand earlier studies of the imperial rivalry, notably Peter Hopkirk's pioneering The Great Game. Tournament of Shadows reads like a racy adventure story, yet there is no need for the authors to embellish their well-researched facts. The region attracted a host of bizarre characters, each with his own idiosyncratic goals. The authors begin with the journey to Bokhara of an ambitious horse doctor, hired by the East India Company in 1806 to improve its breeding stock, and end with the CIA's assistance to anti-Chinese guerrillas in Tibet during the cold war. American participants in the opening of Central Asia have not previously received much attention, but Tournament of Shadows introduces adventurers such as William Rockhill, commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution in the 1880s to explore Tibet, and William McGovern, who, to the chagrin of the British, reached Lhasa in 1923. The wealth and instability of Central Asia continue to keep the region in the headlines, motivating the Soviet Union's disastrous 10-year intervention in Afghanistan and fueling an international race for resources--especially oil--today. --John Stevenson [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Towers of Silence: A Novel'
The third novel of a quartet set in India which began with "The Jewel in the Crown". As the war enters its last bitter stage, the English wives, daughters, mothers and widows of officers embroiled in the ongoing conflict gather in Pankot, their old beliefs and assumptions seriously threatened. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Traffics and Discoveries'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Victorian Colonial Warfare: India, from the Conquest of Sind to the Indian Mutiny'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Mughals'
White Mughals is the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that crossed and transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.
James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Kahir un-Nissa'Most excellent among Women'the great-niece of the Nizam's Prime Minister and a descendant of the Prophet. Kirkpatrick had gone out to India as an ambitious soldier in the army of the East India Company, eager to make his name in the conquest and subjection of the subcontinent. Instead, he fell in love with Khair and overcame many obstacles to marry hernot least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company.
It is a remarkable story, involving secret assignations, court intrigue, harem politics, religious and family disputes. But such things were not unknown; from the early sixteenth century, when the Inquisition banned the Portuguese in Goa from wearing the dhoti, to the eve of the Indian mutiny, the 'white Mughals' who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassments to successive colonial administrations. William Dalrymple unearths such colourful figures as 'Hindoo Stuart', who travelled with his own team of Brahmins to maintain his temple of idols, and who spent many years trying to persuade the memsahibs of Calcutta to adopt the sari; and Sir David Ochterlony, Kirkpatrick's counterpart in Delhi, who took all thirteen of his wives out for evening promenades, each on the back of their own elephant.
In White Mughals, William Dalrymple discovers a world almost entirely unexplored by history, and places at its centre a compelling tale of love, seduction and betrayal. It possesses all the sweep and resonance of a great nineteenth-century novel, set against a background of shifting alliances and the manoeuvring of the great powers, the mercantile ambitions of the British and the imperial dreams of Napoleon. White Mughals, the product of five years' writing and research, triumphantly confirms Dalrymple's reputation as one of the finest writers at work today.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India'
From the early sixteenth century, it was common for British colonizers in India to embarrass the Crown by "turning Turk" or "going native." Few caused greater scandal than James Kirkpatrick, a British resident in the Court of Hyderabad, who converted to Islam and spied on the East India Company in the midst of an affair with Khair un-Nissa, the great-niece of the region's prime minister.
White Moguls is rich with many eccentric characters, from "Hindoo Stuart," who traveled with his own team of Brahmins, to Alexander Gardner, an American whose self-invented costume was showcased by a tartan turban with egret plumes. A remarkable love story set in an exotic and previously unexplored world, White Moguls is full of secrets, intrigue, espionage, and religious disputes and conjures all the resonance of a great nineteenth-century novel. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wicked Women of the Raj: European Women Who Broke Society's Rules and Married Indian Princes'
An unputdownable factual account of the zenana world of the raja and sultans of India, concentrating on the firangi bahus and begums of this veiled world of myths and folklores. The book gives us the stories of many different European women who broke society's rules to marry the heathen Indian princes. Who were these women? Were they gold diggers or hopeless romantics hoping to enact their own Cinderella fairytale? Did they live happily ever after? [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Autobiografia Mahatma Ghandi/ Mahatma Ghandi Auto Biography'
Pocos personajes historicos despiertan un interes tan universal como el de este extraordinario caudillo de la paz, que fue el llamado Mahatma (Alma Grande) Gandhi, lider del movimiento nacionalista de la India y organizador de la resistencia civil contra la dominacion inglesa. [via]
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