Renowned author and journalist Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos uses her talent for investigative reporting to take us deep into the poorest villages in India. Yet, far from being passive victims of their circumstances, the women who live there have joined forces and are making astute use of microcredit to break the cycle of poverty.Microcredit was made famous by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and consists of very small loans made primarily to women for the production of essential co...

Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay is the first major body of annotated texts in James Bay Cree, and a unique documentation of Swampy and Moose Cree (Western James Bay) usage of the 1950s and 1960s.Conversations and interviews with 16 different speakers include: legends, reminiscences, historical narratives, stories and conversations, as well as descriptions of technology. The book includes a detailed pronunciation guide, notes on Cree terms, info...

This book explores how Marshall McLuhan, with urbanist Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and artist György Kepes, responded to crises in the 60s and 70s similar to what we now face: human-to-human violence on a planetary scale, carving inequities and fomented by arms and mediation; catastrophic human to non-human relations, with human activity sparking irreversible (and accelerating) environmental degradation; imbalanced human-to-machine relations, with computational decision-making outstripping human in...

Mark Tully is incomparable. No one has a greater understanding of the passions, the contradictions, the humour, the tragedy and the staggering resilience that constitute India. In his long awaited new book, he delves further than ever before into this country of one billion people. Covering subjects as diverse as Hindu extremism, bonded child labour, Sufi mysticism, the crisis in agriculture, the persistence of political corruption and the problem of Kashmir, he paints a picture of India a...

Since the Indian economy was liberated from bureaucratic, socialist controls in 1991, it has developed rapidly. A country once renowned for the backwardness of its industries, its commerce and its financial market is now viewed as potentially one of the major world economies of the twenty-first century.But there are many questions which need to be asked about the sustainability of this rapid economic growth and its effect on the stability of the country. Have the changes had any im...

“[A] sharply observed study . . . richly detailed portraits.”—EconomistSomini Sengupta emigrated from Calcutta to California as a young child in 1975. Returning thirty years later as the bureau chief for The New York Times, she found a vastly different country: one defined as much by aspiration and possibility—at least by the illusion of possibility—as it is by the structures of sex and caste. The End of Karma is an exploration of this ne...

Who can foretell India's future? Mr. Joshi is a fortune teller in a slum in south Delhi who uses a soothsaying green parrot to make predictions. When Adam Roberts visited him in 2012, Joshi's parrot declared that India was destined to become the most powerful nation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The parrot also foretold that India would win the soccer World Cup.Parrots may not be the preeminent political authority, but many Indians were just as confident. So Adam Roberts spen...

Crowded, hot, subject to violent swings in climate, with a government unable or unwilling to face the most vital challenges, the rich and poor increasingly living in worlds apart; for most of the world, this picture is of a possible future. For India, it is the very real present.In this lyrical exploration of life, loss, and survival, Meera Subramanian travels in search of the ordinary people and microenterprises determined to revive India's ravaged natural world: an engineer-turne...

As 2012 came to a close, news of the gang rape of a young woman in India's capital generated headlines around the world. Her assault on a moving bus with a metal rod, and her death two weeks later from her injuries, focused attention on the dark side of the world's largest democracy: the struggle that faces many Indian women in a country where chauvinistic and misogynistic attitudes prevail.The Wall Street Journal's India bureau explored this horrendous crime and others th...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL WRITING PRIZE'Witty, polished, honest and insightful, The Epic City is likely to become for Calcutta what Suketu Mehta's classic Maximum City is for Mumbai' William Dalrymple, ObserverWhen Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times.

The last one-and-a-half years in India have been defined by the anti-graft agitation led by Anna Hazare. His key lieutenant, Arvind Kejriwal, has played a central role in the movement. In 2012, as it became clear that the political establishment was not going to accede to the main demand of the movement - to pass the Lokpal Bill. Team Anna demanded the setting up of a Special Investigative Team to probe corrupt politicians. On 25 July 2012, Kejriwal, along with two of his colleagues and An...

The book Going back to Gettysburg will be bought like hot cakes in intellectual circles in both America and India because it is a light presentation of the uniqueness of the American Civil War (1861-1965) in which 6,00,000 American soldiers, mostly White, laid down their lives to secure the release of four million Black slaves in America. It has no parallel in the history and mythology of the world. It is the only war where combatants fought over the Rights of other oppressed beings and is...