Readers Inc

Friday, February 4, 2011

Expose

One word which suitably describes the book is brave! It is bold, courageous and out and out. It is well documented and honest. The president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward told Goldberg says, “of course there’s a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left. We all know it- the whole damn world knows it- but that doesn’t mean that we have to put it on air!” Well Goldberg did.

He could have said all the things he said in the Wall Street Journal and a lot more, without using his name, but he had the guts to attach his name to what he believed.

Alan Keyes discusses media bias with Bernard Goldberg

The reaction at CBS was predictable: Goldberg, who had worked his way up to the top of CBS news, winning several Emmys, was almost fired, given no assignments for several months, and then marginalized to bouncing from one forgotten news magazine to another for four years, until he retired in 2000.

However, outside the media world, and even with a few quiet voices of support inside the media, Goldberg gained a national voice - all for saying what everyone else could see and yet what the media continues to deny.

The book is quirky and is heaped with sarcasm and is hence an interesting read. Goldberg has written his mind without as such sparing anybody, breaking ranks and naming names.

Liberal Media Bias - Bernard Goldberg on O'Reilly Factor

However, the book blatantly attacks not just the liberal bias but certain former colleagues of Goldberg’s as well. At times the criticism comes across to be greater than required, almost as if the book is a platform to get back at them. However the book is an invaluable aid and helps in carefully contemplating the implications of what we see in the media. We can use the knowledge gained in this process to challenge the media themselves.

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Sanhita Sinha Chowdhury

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Partitions

Picking up this book to review wasn’t instant or even natural for me. The stories of partition heard from my grandparents had never left me feeling pleasant. Needless to say I was apprehensive about the book…but only till I opened it. The text enthralled me from the introduction itself. And the 50 stories followed.

Manto's narrative art sweeps the readers along with the flow of events; he lets them suffer, fear, believe. He is a disturbing writer who shocks the reader with his candidness, sometimes with his crudity. Whether he writes of sex or the life of prostitutes, on social or on political issues, the stories are full of fire. The writing is simple and in that sense extremely powerful but in a few stories disconnect can be felt because of the lack of details.

His magnificent style of collecting visuals and putting them on paper justifies the use of the word ‘sketches’ in the title. With each story tugging at your heart in its own way, Manto almost recreates what must’ve prevailed in those days.

Generations later, the stories managed to move me the way they did. Each story is interestingly structured and sensitised me about the issues that haunted those times, some of which still exist in varied degrees and some which seem completely irrelevant today.

The partition has gone down in history as one of the most revolutionary and significant events in the subcontinent. Its knowledge is important. The frenzy then may not be replicated today in all its fervour and intensity, but the today’s reality of India, her communities and her people sometimes comes close and that renders the text relevant for most media personnel today.

The stories fired me up. They consumed me, overwhelmed me, jolted me and bared me…

Reading the book changed me somewhere and I believe if a book can do THAT for any reader, it has achieved its purpose.

More books on Partition: http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=partition&btnG=Search+Books#sclient=psy&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=bks:1&q=partition+india&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=87100f552b3d26bd
About the Author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saadat_Hasan_Manto

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Guest blogger – Tapshi Dhanda

DEAL OF THE DAY

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Attn: Fellow Book Addicts!

If any of you fellow book addicts have LOVED a book and would like to review it on this blog, please mail it to jerusha7@gmail.com. If we find it interesting enough, we’ll post it!

DEAL OF THE DAY

It’s a Numbers Game

It’s informative, entertaining, empowering and definitely engaging. Joel Best in this book has managed to put across a subject that had all the potential to become drab and boring, in a way, that makes the reader feel smarter than he/she might be. And that is the most astounding part about the book; it makes the study of statistics and NUMBERS enjoyable and comprehensive. The contents are compiled in a logical, neat, easy to understand manner. At places there seems an overdose of examples, but they only make the book more interesting and feasible to understand.

Our culture depends on numbers and treats them seriously. Even when we suspect that our statistics are flawed, we realise we can’t get along without figures. Our world today is too complicated to comprehend without resorting to numbers; we need statistics to make sense of what’s happening and to make choices. Best confronts us with the lunacy of statistical goof ups, some serious manipulations that might be made to distort views and the melodrama in numbers preferred by advocates and often media as well. His examples are well researched upon and easy to relate to. His immaculate and smart decoding of all statistics, at times brings you face to face with your own incompetency in statistical knowledge. That is when you realise, it’s not our statistical illiteracy but our lack of observation of the apparent, obvious flaws in the statistics we are being fed, that is the handicap.

Figures may not always be valid or meaningful and this book is a brilliant guide to learn to tell the difference between ones that are and aren’t. the book widens your view and scope of interpreting and analysing STATS, to get the actual dimensions of the story that the numbers are conveying.

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Guest Blogger – Tapshi Dhanda

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

A Different Lolita

Reading Lolita in Tehran is not just another book about suppression of women. The unique style of writing by intertwining fiction and reality adds a distinct freshness to the story, making it a moving testament of the power of art and its ability to change people’s lives.

Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait, a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It looks into the injustices andcruel torture that women have to silently bear with; it ridicules the education system existing at that time, which was obsessed with the color of one’s lips and the subversive potential of a single strand of hair rather than being concerned about the quality of education, it mocks the laws which distorts man-woman relations by trying to make half the population invisible.

Stealing the words of Humbert, the poet/ criminal of Lolita, Azar Nafisi asks the reader to imagine the seven students and her against the tyranny of time and politics, to imagine them as they have never dared to imagine themselves: in their private and secret moments, in the most extraordinary ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down shady streets or just reading Lolita in Tehran. And then to imagine them with all this confiscated, driven underground. The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is reality for the women of Tehran: Confiscation of their lives which have become a figment of someone else’s dreams. Nafisi refers to these women as double victims because not only their life but also their life story is taken away from them”

However Nafisi’s new memoir is a riveting story of hope, disillusionment, and hope rekindled.

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