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Although Cuba is only ninety miles from Key West, Florida, the ideological split between the United States and Cuba has been insurmountable since the beginning of Castro’s revolution. In this book, the author Ian Michael James concentrates on the lives of three displaced Cubans as he intertwines their stories through the pages. Yet, while doing so, James brings to the forefront the tragic story of a divided country under a dictator’s fierce regime where family members have to take heartrending decisions and separate from each other.

With the initiation of a regime that was supposed to free the Cubans but failed miserably to do so, families separated for reasons of political oppression, economical circumstances, or the fear for their lives. This in turn led to the Cubans’ different and complicated ways of looking at the events in their lives and those of their compatriots.

Of the three people whose lives are brought to view, the story of Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo is the most political. Eloy fought together with Castro and many other men to bring freedom to his people from the Batista’s corrupt regime. When the revolution succeeded and Castro became the new tyrant, Eloy turned against the new government and Castro turned against Eloy. Barely avoiding execution, Eloy spent twenty years in prison. When he came to Miami after being released in 1986, Eloy had mellowed. He thought a dialogue with Castro could be possible. Later on, he could not live away from his fatherland, and he moved back to Cuba.

Paquito D’Rivera was very young when Castro took over Cuba. He had some freedom later on as a musician but not enough opportunities for the achievement he desired as a jazz saxophonist. He defected, leaving his family behind. It took many years for him to see his family again.

Nancy Lledes Espinoza, a chemical engineer, was born in 1962, three years after Castro’s revolution. She grew up believing in Castro and his regime. After she fell in love and got married, however, she and her husband started seeing things differently. Eventually, Nancy and her husband defected, although separately, putting their lives in danger and leaving their families behind. Nancy’s mother was and still is a staunch defender of Castro.

After an the ink-drawn map of Cuba in its beginning and a preface by the author, Ninety Miles: Cuban Journeys in the Age of Castro holds sixteen chapters, in which the lives of these three people are told, not one by one but all at the same time and interlinked with the chronological events. Still, the story is not confusing because of the masterful narrative and effective language.

The book is in hardcover, 216 pages, and with ISBN-10: 0742540421 and ISBN-13: 978-0742540422.

The author, Ian Michael James, a graduate of Duke and Stanford universities, is a correspondent for The Associated Press and currently their bureau chief in Venezuela, according to the biography given on the inside cover of the book.

This book is written with deep historical and political insight, highlighting the trauma of the Cubans. In addition, it is an exemplary piece of journalistic achievement, and it reads like a suspense story, capturing the reader from its beginning to its end. I highly recommend Ninety Miles: Cuban Journeys in the Age of Castro to anyone who has any amount of interest in this subject.

Remembrances of Times Past

by Marta Hiatt

Northern Star Press (2006)

ISBN 9780962092930

Reviewed by Debra Gaynor for Reader Views (9/06)

“Remembrances of Times Past” is a trip down memory lane for the older generations and a great lesson of wisdom for the younger generations. There is much to be learned from this fabulous book filled with photos and history of the 1900′s.

Do you long for the past when a quiet evening was spent in a swing on the front porch rather than in front of a TV? It was a time when a home cooked meal was on the table when dad and children arrived home and the smell of homemade cookies drifted through the home drawing family members toward the kitchen. TV shows insisted married couples sleep in twin beds and a viewer would never see an advertisement for personal hygiene products. “Remembrances of Times Past” has all of this and more. “This book is a nostalgic journey back to a time of model-T Fords, stay-at-home moms, vinyl long-playing records, atom-bomb shelters, strict rules of etiquette, radio days and manual typewriters.” People of the Twentieth Century have seen more changes than any other generation through out history. Ms. Hiatt’s nostalgic look at the past brings us quiet days without cell phones or computers, two lane highways and a time when folks waved at you with a smile on their face. Those born in the first half of the century remember outhouses, tin bathtubs, family meal time, washing your own dishes and skates that need keys. They remember a time without shopping on Sunday’s, pantyhose, and private phone lines. The past was a time of innocence.

Ms. Hiatt offers a balanced look at the past remembering not only the “good old days” but the hardship and fears that surrounded that time period. Rarely was there indoor plumbing and there were no automatic dishwashers (other than the woman of the house), cell phones or computers. It was a time of depression, many lost their homes and families. It was a time of fear with the threats of war and the construction of bomb shelters.

This is the kind of book you want to spend time enjoying. I’m glad Ms. Hiatt jogged our memory. She has offered us wisdom and insight into our past. It is with pleasure that I highly recommend this book.

Most of us are familiar with the bleakness and the general connotation of Kristallnacht. It takes some courage, however, to face the poignant, agonizing, and tragic personal stories of the survivors of that “night of the broken glass.”

This book has put humanity’s face on the history of one of the most atrocious nights of the world’s recent past with the startlingly detailed accounts of those who lived it. The author, through his microscopic focusing ability, has amassed eye-witness accounts and has told the history of a horrifying night and its repercussions through the several years that followed it.

At least for me, “Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction” was very difficult to read without getting profoundly moved and deeply saddened; however, I read the book to the end without putting it down and without losing attention, because this book proved to be much more significant than any other piece of writing I had come across on the subject.

Kristallnacht occurred while people in the world watched powerlessly, although they understood what was happening. Some recorded the details; others shrugged it off; and most, even if threatened by it, froze in action. “Night of the broken glass” was mob behavior encouraged and abetted by the Third Reich.

The anti-Jew sentiment or rather the actions stemming from that sentiment had begun as early as 1933 at the onset of the Nazi Germany and grew to monstrous dimensions by November,1939. The German nation’s each imperfection was blamed on its Jewish population with an attempt to swing the public opinion against the Jews. Thus, the deportation of the Jews from Germany had begun quite a few years before November 10, 1939, the date of the Kristallnacht.

The impossibility for all the Jews to leave Germany had many reasons. Some thought the homeland they fought for in World War .I. would never betray them. Others could not find passage to other countries. Most countries had immigration quotas and they allowed only so many people. The Jews, therefore, found themselves locked in a threatening situation and in a dangerous place they had come to love and respect as their homeland.

During these forced deportations of the Semites, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen year-old Jewish boy–after getting word of his family’s plight–shot and mortally wounded the Third Secretary to the German Ambassador in Paris. This became the spark to inflame the hatred of the German masses against the Jews.

On the “night of the broken glass,” almost every synagogue was burned; Jewish cemeteries were desecrated; private homes and stores belonging to Jews were broken into and every single item demolished or confiscated; and men and women–rich or poor, young or old, healthy or infirm–were beaten, killed, or terrorized. Vienna, known as the “Jewish City,” was mostly burned, and in other cities, all Jewish neighborhoods were wrecked.

In one of the personal stories, then-six-year old Lea Weems remembers, after the Nazis came in and broke everything her family owned, “they pushed my father and grandfather down the stairs. I was screaming and pulling on my father’s sleeve trying to keep him from leaving.”

The book is made up of similar hair-raising remembrances of the survivors of Kristallnacht through their escape or destiny. The writer has also noted the generous and kind actions of the few Germans who were human enough to see the wrong in their fellow citizens, for some of them helped the Jews as much as they could.

The writer, Sir Martin Gilbert, is a British historian with more than seventy volumes and Kristallnacht is his seventy-seventh book. He is well known as Churchill’s historian. Among his other works are: The Churchill Biography, Jerusalem, Holocaust, British History, European History, Atlases, World History, Jewish History and several ‘Books on Tape’ like Aushwitz. the Allies, In Search of Churchill, Israel and Zionism.

The book, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, is 314 pages, in hardcover and with ISBN:0060570830.

The lessons to be learned from Kristallnacht is best said in Sir Martin Gilbert’s words as: “It taught those who were the source of prejudice that a whole people can be demonized; that a whole nation can be turned totally and obscenely against a decent, hard-working, creative, loyal and integral part of its own society. This point was made on 19 August 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI, on his first visit to his native Germany after becoming Pope, went to the Roonstrasse synagogue in Cologne…”

Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction is an irreplaceable book and it deserves a good deal of attention from history buffs and all readers alike.

It is fifty years since Doris Lessing published Going Home, an account of her return to Rhodesia, the country where she grew up. By then in her thirties, she had already achieved the status of restricted person because of her political allegiances and her declared opposition to illiberal white rule. These days Zimbabwe makes the news because of internal strife and oppression. It is worth remembering, however, that fifty years ago the very structures of Southern Rhodesian society were built upon oppression, an oppression based purely on race.

Fifty years on Doris Lessing’s Going Home an historical record of this noxious system, a record that is more effective, indeed more powerful because of its reflective and observational, rather than analytical style. Doris Lessing, a one-time card-carrying Communist, laid a large slice of the blame for the perpetuation of discrimination firmly at the door of the white working class. Though not all white workers were rich – indeed she records that many were abjectly poor – what they had and sought to preserve was an elevated status relative to the black population. She describes white artisans as white first and artisans second. Though trade unions actively sought equal pay for equal work, they never campaigned for any kind of parity for black workers. On the contrary, they demanded the maintenance of racially differentiated pay rates. How’s that for the spirit of socialist internationalism and brotherhood! (I accept there is a misplaced word there…). In fact Doris Lessing records that it was the relatively liberal capitalist enterprises that demanded more black labour, their motive of course arising from cost savings, not philanthropy. So trade unions spent much of their time making sure that companies hired their quota of higher paid, white labour.

Even in the 1950s, she remarks on the likelihood that many Africans were already better educated than their white counterparts. White youth shunned education as unnecessary, while Africans saw it as a possible salvation. She notes that the people who treated the African population the worst were recent immigrants from Europe, particularly those from Britain, who tended to be less educated themselves and drawn from the ranks of the politically reactionary. Such people, apparently, were equally critical of immigrants from southern Europe, and expected Spaniards and Greeks to work for African wages, not the white wages that they themselves demanded.

The situation in Rhodesia, clearly, had to change. Not only was such crass discrimination unsustainable, it was also comic, as are all racially posited class systems. While the South Africans over the border created honorary whites of the Japanese they increasingly had to do business with, the Rhodesians went through their own equally idiotic contortions. An example of such nonsense is quoted by Doris Lessing when she remarks that there was a privileged group of Africans who were granted the right not to carry passes with them at all times, as long as they carried a pass to record their exemption.

But it is also worth remembering that Doris Lessing, herself, was a banned person, unable to travel to certain places and very much under the watchful eyes of the authorities. In Going Home she observes a society that had to collapse under the weight of its unsustainable contradictions. The fact that this took more than twenty years after the book was written was nothing less than a crime, and probably contributed to the subsequent and equally lamentable reaction.

Doris Lessing records seeing a British film towards the end of her travels. She describes it as a “cosy little drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of African farmers in their big cars”. Fifty years on, Britain is probably cosy and provincial, and the snobberies are still rife. But now it is not Rhodesia where these reactionaries look down on people of other races overpay and under-educated themselves. It is not in Africa where corporations would dearly love to employ cheaper labour, imported if need be. Rhodesia’s white privilege of the 1950s was obviously absurd. But there are some parallels with economic and class relations in the Britain of today and, like all good books, Doris Lessing’s Going Home may even add prescience to its qualities.

Please note there is a definite demarcation between a book review and an art critique, or museum curation. Those latter skill sets are beyond the scope of this humble book reviewer, and are best left to the professionals who study the history of firearms of specific ages throughout civilization. What I can attest to is the impact this book has on the reader, and how modestly George W. Jones narrates his captions of his macro-focused photographs demonstrating his extraordinary skill as an artisan of miniatures and replicas.

In this book titled, “David Tunkl Crossbow,” George W. Jones takes the reader on a step-by-step process of the design of the crossbow, paying particular attention to his choices of materials, the detail of his inletting skills, and the mechanical integrity of the device. Respectfully defining all specialized words used in the creation of a 17th century replica, the reader is brought up a wrung of vernacular and thus appreciation for the immense level of skill and attention to detail.

I found most interesting two quotes inserted in the book written by the second Lateran Council, under Pope Innocent 11, April, 1139. “We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hated by God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.” And the second quote, “As soon as peace is restored, we will banish from the kingdom all foreign born knights, crossbow men, sergeants and mercenary soldiers who have come with horses and arms to the kingdom’s hurt.” These quotes show the sociological effect of the quantum leap weapons took with the advent of the crossbow. The significance of the device was, for the first time, a technological plateau where the operator need not have the strength nor skill of a warrior, yet only the possession of the weapon and the ability to point and shoot. Knowing how this device has shifted deathly power from the soldier to that of the common citizen became a concern to the Church.

As an oversized “coffee-table” format, with glossy paper using reverse white on black type, this book is impressively dramatic with its presence and quality of printing. Although terse in words, the images speak for themselves. Chronologically arranged depicting the year of work which went into the creation of the crossbow, the reader gets a feel for the labor of love George W. Jones ensconces into his work. This book is awe inspiring to any age reader, would indeed make a great gift, and is a fitting tribute to the art of George W. Jones.

We all know a boomerang is a stick that when thrown, comes back to the thrower. Interestingly, the word isn’t English, it’s derived from the Australian Aboriginals which used the stick primarily for hunting, but has assimilated its use in English as well as Russian. The other definition of boomerang means “backfire.” Afghan Boomerang, the title of Oleg Novinkov’s non-fiction book dealing with the parallels between the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and what is now being witnessed by the USA’s involvement is exactly that; an in depth analysis of the backfiring of events, circumstances and lessons previously learned by the Soviets. If there is any truth to the saying, “History repeats itself,” then Oleg Novinkov is not at all a soothsayer, but a scientifically minded articulator, proving the truth by Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum – which was to be demonstrated).

A fascinating individual, Dr. Oleg Novinkov served for just less than two years as a Soviet Military medical officer stationed in Afghanistan back in the 1980′s. He has since gone on to many achievements within the Soviet and NASA space programs, martial arts, medical advances, and international business. Now living in the USA, he returned some 30 years after first being stationed in Afghanistan whereas his thoughts are given the insight from his own experiences; his first-hand observations, known factual statements and uncanny realizations which only his unique perspective can impart and inform those of us poised outside of these borders.

Fact filled and impeccably written, Dr. Novinkov writes in a candid, frank and incredibly detailed fashion, assimilating a chronicle of the events over the past decades into a densely informative 429 page book. Highlighted with dozens of captioned photographs, prefaced with accolades from high ranking Soviet military officials, appendixes with factual summaries of deaths and wounded, this book is an absorbing read. Written from a posture of a philanthropic humanitarian, Dr. Oleg Novinkov doesn’t harp on the political differences of the cultures as being good or bad, right or wrong, but offers a high-level view only capable of being perceived from someone with such a unique heritage. He breaks down to the simplest of reasons why things are the way they are, and why in many cases they cannot change.

Being published at a time of such historical importance, now with the US troops being withdrawn in the region, this book is worthy of being a bit too late for giving lawmakers advice, however nonetheless important for its historical perspective. I highly recommend this to a broad audience of readers, young adults, students, military personnel, government officials, all USA citizens and those that wish to be informed around the world. It doesn’t get more interesting to hear the events of history written by someone that has lived through the battles, breathed the dust, seen the ramifications of war, and has grown to know the human side of people’s cultural differences.

Participation in the Vietnam War for most soldiers caused profound lifelong effects that resulted from their experiences during that era. Vietnam War memoirs have become the fodder for many books recounting that time and one such book, In Our Duffel Bags written by Vietnam Vets, First Lieutenant Richard C. Geschke and Lieutenant Robert A. Toto. Both men are long time service buddies as well as friends and it is through this book they share the sometimes harrowing events encountered during their service in the “War with no purpose; no mission statement.” This narrative book uniquely conveys each man’s first hand experiences as soldiers serving in the US Army during the Vietnam War era and their transition to civilian life afterwards.

Their eye opening journey through the military started with voluntary enlisting into the United States Army ROTC program during college. Upon graduation, they were first brought into Infantry Officer Basic Training in Fort Benning, Georgia, then moved to places like West Germany, Panama and eventually found themselves in the dreaded area of Southeast Asia, Vietnam. During their time spent serving in the military, the duffel bags of these soldiers not only held their necessary supplies but also carried their stress filled memories of pain, frustration, loneliness, fear, determination and death as they served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1972. It is by writing this book that they have finally unpacked the memories contained in their duffel bags.

In Our Duffel Bags is not written in a way that is over the top with military lingo as one might expect in a book of this nature, however it does includes a glossary to explain the military jargon that was used throughout the book. While the majority of the chapters are written by Richard C. Geschke, there are also the first hand accounts that are intermittently inserted throughout the book written by co-author and long time friend, Robert A. Toto. Having interweaving stories by two authors helps to complete the picture with a different perspective and insight. Ultimately in this book the Vietnam soldier’s life is laid out; the good, the bad, the weak and the strong, are all defined by the stories in this book. For some, reading this book will be a venture down memory lane perhaps sparking their own buried memories and emotions making this book a really good and relatable read. For other readers who may not have been old enough to remember the war, let alone be a soldier in it, this book will read like a history text book with facts drawn from some of the original participants. The tone of the book is very factual and at times dry, but is intelligently written. The stories are written in a down to earth manner using language that makes it easy to relate to the storytellers. This is the type of book that can be a captivating read for those wanting to indulge in the mindsets of young men forced into becoming soldiers during a war in which no one wanted to fight.

No one waxes nostalgic for the St. Louis Browns.

The Boston Braves, too, are largely forgotten in baseball’s faded past.

Write off, too, the Philadelphia A’s, and in our own time, the Montreal Expos.

But, oh, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Dodgers, will ever be “The Boys of Summer.”

Tribute Books has a new book out on the Bums, “Brooklyn Dodgers: The Last Great Pennant Drive, 1957.” The slim 90-page volume sells for $14.95. Author John R. Nordell Jr. brings both personal and professional credentials to the table. He holds a doctorate in history from Penn State and had previously written about a heavy subject – the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The catastrophic defeat in Indochina for the French helped set up our involvement in Vietnam and reverberates in American foreign policy to this day.

This is a lighter topic, though, and Nordell also brings the childhood delight of a fan to the book. He saw a game at Ebbets Field in the summer of ’57, his first game. Pictures taken by his father at the game, including a rare view of famed Ringling Brothers clown Emmett Kelly as the Dodger “Bum,” lend a very personal touch.

It’s also a very intriguing topic for a book. The Dodgers won pennants in ’52, ’53, ’55 and ’56. 1955 is remembered as the year they finally won the World Series. 1956 is remembered for the Yankee’s Don Larsen throwing a perfect game against the Dodgers in the series. 1954 is remembered as the year the Giants edged out the Dodgers on Bobby Thomson’s home run.

But ’57 was a fadeaway year. Several veteran Dodger stars were on the decline. Then, throughout the year, speculation built that the Dodgers would depart for Los Angeles.

Nordell, though, defines his book very narrowly. He focuses on a brief two-week period after the All-Star break when the Dodgers used a winning streak to pull within a game of the lead. For much of the summer, five teams out of an eight-team league, Milwaukee, the Reds, the Dodgers, Giants and Phillies, were close to the lead.

Ultimately, the Braves of a young Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette, would pull away, and win the pennant by eight games.

Nordell summarizes each of the daily games in the pennant races – about two or three paragraphs each – much in the same way you would read in the daily wrapups by the Associated Press. This rather spare method is fleshed out by anecdotes in footnotes at the end of the chapters. Almost all the research seems to be drawn from secondary sources. I do not know if many, or any, of the key Dodgers of that era are still alive, but interviews with a few would have added mightily.

The last chapter, the best, deals with the team’s departure for the West Coast. Nordell is nostalgic and sentimental about the flight of the Dodgers, a theme that’s been repeated over and over.

People in general remember the ’50s as a sort of baseball golden age, as in the song, “Willie, Mickey and the Duke.” The reality is that baseball attendance was sinking throughout much of the ’50s, with teams trapped in aging stadiums in decaying neighborhoods. The Dodgers of ’57 drew 1.03 million fans that year, fifth in an eight-team league. Today, that attendance would put them in last place in both leagues.

Think of it, the Dodgers of Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Don Drysdale and Gil Hodges, selling 13,000 tickets a game. Folks’ hearts may have been with the team, but not their wallets.

ISBN: 9780976507291

120 pp.

$14.95

The author did a considerable job of documenting and fact checking numerous White House internal memos, meetings, interviews, critical decisions on Afghanistan and the campaign in Pakistan. This book is significant because the contents will help the current and future Presidents cope with the difficult decision surrounding military conflicts of every kind.

The counterinsurgency envisioned by General David Petraeus is delineated in the book at some length. Inherent in this strategy is the task of marginalizing the influence of Al Qaeda and non-cooperative elements in the Taliban. To accomplish this feat, our troops must have the concurrence of the local population. Even Niccolo Macchiavelli explained that an occupying force must have the concurrence of the local citizenry before attempting any further action.

The book anticipates a USA exit plan in Afghanistan. First, the country has a number of constituencies like the Pashtun (40%), Tajik (25%), Hazara (19%) Uzbek and Turkmen – 10% and others. We need to get better information on the goals of these various subgroups in order to establish areas of congruency, as well as areas where concurrence may be difficult or impossible. In addition, the religious mix is about 85% Sunni and 15% Sh’ia Muslim.

The population has a life expectancy under 50 years of age and the literacy level is under 40%. These statistics indicate that the job of educating the population will not be easy. The United States cannot be responsible for nation-building in Afghanistan; however, our military must be concerned about getting political quiescence concurrent with a rational phaseout of troops and eventual governance by the local people.

Some nation building may be necessary in order to stabilize the country and preclude the return of factions within the old Soviet Union or elsewhere. The United States simply cannot expend all of this effort in Afghanistan only to experience a repeat performance of the Soviet (or some faction thereof) invasion of Afghanistan.

Vice President Biden is inclined to limit the military vision in Afghanistan. This “gut feeling” makes sense based upon the bloody history which includes experiences by the Soviets, Great Britain and Alexander the Great ( of all people).

The book makes clear that there are no uniform goals for our Afghanistan involvement despite a 6 year incremental involvement. Let me establish some goals after having read the book.

(1) The United States should withdraw incrementally and train Afghani forces to take over the job of managing resistance from Al Qaeda, the Taliban and even hostile foreign influences. Here, commando training is in order concurrent with the use of some military hardware. Our experience with drones has had some success.

(2) The United States should engage in some nation building activity to promote higher literacy rates and better life expectancy. We have at our disposal IT technologies, Advice Giving systems in artificial intelligence, the Red Cross and other international agencies to assist. Generic drugs are available at affordable prices due to the expiry of patents.

In addition, we have up-to-date technologies to organize and operate municipal accounting systems and processes. Soon, we will have commercializable desalination plants powered by solar energy or the “Artificial Sun”. Afghanistan could gain access for desalination plants via pipelines to the Caspian Sea proximate to the Kara Kum Desert, the Gulf of Oman or the Arabian Sea.

We may need desalination because the workforce is over 60% agriculture. Some mountain rivers produce intermittent fertile valleys. These are massive infrastructure undertakings traversing all of the engineering arts.

(3) The United States should encourage the development of Afghani energy resources to fund post-war economic activity. There are models; such as, the Grameen Bank to provide affordable financing.

Britain’s war in Afghanistan turned out to be an exercise in futility. At the height of its power in India, Britain sought to create stability in the subcontinent. Another goal was to prevent Russian and Persian encroachments. To some extent, the USA has to encourage the same goal today in order to facilitate our withdrawal. The British implementation plan was to remove a colorful and popular leader from the Afghan throne. The replacement was with an unpopular, though legitimate, king.

The experiment ended when a British resident in Kabul was brutally murdered by an angry crowd. A British envoy was shot by an Afghan leader during an encounter. His dismembered corpse was hung in effigy in a Kabul bazaar. The ill-fated retreat of the British resulted in the deaths
of thousands of people.

Source: Retreat from Kabul: The Catastrophic British Defeat in Afghanistan 1842 by Patrick McCrory The Lyons Press ( November 2007)

There are Islamic radicals in Afghanistan. Many of them are more concerned with maintaining ancient tribal customs than in supporting global Islamic conquest. These tribal customs include keeping women from school and banning popular music. A few Pashtun tribes can be problematic.

The Pashtun people are about 40 percent of the Afghan population. Most Pashtuns live across the border in Pakistan. The radical elements operate on both sides of the border and have done so for many centuries (long before those borders were drawn.) The Pashtuns still pride themselves on delaying Alexander the Great well over 2000 years ago. Alexander the Great defeated the Pashtuns although there may be some debate on this subject. Eventually, Alexander exited and the tribes carried on as before. Pashtun society consists of many tribes and clans who were unsuccessful in establishing an independent government in their land until the rise of the Hotaki dynasty and Durrani Empire in the early 18th century.

Alexander the Great pursued Bessus, Darius III’s kinsmen and one of his murderers. The pursuit was into the territory of modern Afghanistan. Bessus declared himself successor and enemy to Persian invaders. Afghanistan was part of the Persian Empire which, with the defeat of Darius, belonged to Alexander’s Empire.

Eventually, some of Bessus’s commanders would turn him over to Alexander. Nevertheless, Alexander continued to meet with resistance from men like Spitamenes. He and his resistors were defeated over time and all of the Persian provinces fell to Alexander eventually.

Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger won the Booker Prize and was notable for its intriguing form. I thought it would be a hard act to follow. It would need a great writer to be able to make a repeat match of both originality and style with engaging content. So on beginning Between The Assassinations I was prepared to be disappointed. I need not have worried because Aravind Adiga’s 2010 novel is perhaps a greater success than the earlier prize winner.

The novel does not have a linear plot, nor does it feature any resolution to satisfy the kind of reader that needs a story. But it does have its stories, several of them. Between The Assassinations is in fact a set of short stories, albeit related, rather than a novel. But the beauty of the form is that the book sets these different and indeed divergent tales in a single place, a fictitious town called Kittur.

It’s on India’s west coast, south of Goa and north of Cochin. Kittur presents the expected mix of religion, caste and class that uniquely yet never definitively illustrate Indian society. And by means of stories that highlight cultural, linguistic and social similarities and differences, Aravind Adiga paints a compelling and utterly vivid picture of life in the town. The observation that this amalgam both influences and in some ways determines these experiences is what makes Between The Assassinations a novel rather than a set of stories. It is the place and its culture that is the main character.

The title gives the setting in time. The book’s material thus spans the years between the assassinations of the two Ghandis, Indira and Rajiv. So it is the 1980s, and politics, business, marriage, love, loyalty, development, change and corruption all figure. Aravind Adiga’s juxtaposition of themes to be found in Kittur town and society thus leads us through times of questioning, rapid change and wealth creation. The book’s major success is that this conducted tour of recent history never once leads the reader where the reader does not willingly want to go. The stories are vivid, the personal relationships intriguing, the settings both informative and challenging.

Between The Assassinations is a remarkable achievement. The author has succeeded in writing a thoroughly serious novel with strong intellectual threads via a set of related stories that can each be enjoyed at face value, just as stories, if that is what the reader wants. Writing rarely gets as sophisticated as this or indeed as enjoyable, since humour, often rather barbed, is always close to the surface. Between The Assassinations is a wonderful achievement.