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OverviewUnsurpassed as a prose stylist, Ved Mehta is an acknowledged master of the essay form. In this book?the first special collection of Mehta`s outstanding writings?the distinguished author demonstrates a wide range of possibilities available to the narrative and descriptive writer today. Addressing subjects that range from religion to politics and on to education, and writing with eloquence and high style, Mehta here offers a sampling of his works. Mehta provides a splendid, insightful introduction on the craft of the essay, meditating on the long history and diverse purposes of the form and on the struggle of learning to write in it himself. In the eight reportorial, autobiographical, and reflective essays that follow?each a self-contained examination of cultural, intellectual, or personal themes?he writes on his experience of becoming an American citizen; on Christian theology, with a focus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer; on Calcutta and the poorest of the Indian poor; on the disastrous fates of three of Mehta`s brilliant Oxford contemporaries; and on a variety of other subjects. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Ved MehtaPublisher: Yale University Press Imprint: Yale University Press Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 21.00cm Weight: 0.472kg ISBN: 9780300075618ISBN 10: 0300075618 Pages: 416 Publication Date: 11 August 1998 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsLongtime New Yorker writer Mehta (Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, 1998, etc.) takes on the awkward task of selecting pieces representative of his 40-year career. Mehta published his first book in 1957 at the age of 21 following his first year at Oxford. He would write 20 more, many autobiographical or based on essays that originally appeared in the New Yorker, whose editor, William Shawn, taught Mehta the principles of good writing . . . clarity, harmony, truth, and unfailing courtesy to the reader. At his best, Mehta is a stylist whose personal fascination with a subject can lend energy to the essay form, as in The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station, his lengthy profile of Indian novelist R.K. Narayan. Conducted in New York, his interviews of Narayan do reveal both the literary figure and the man. Sitting in Narayan's borrowed apartment on East 57th Street, chewing betel nut, the two men range in conversational topics from Narayan's takes on Western writers - mostly bores, such as Joyce, Hemingway, and Faulkner - to tearful recollections of his late wife. Mehta also does a marvelous job in Nonviolence of examining Mahatma Gandhi's controversial celibacy and how this ahimea, or love force, prepared him for his history-making work. However, Mehta is sometimes indubitably long-winded, as in his overly long piece on the spite and vitriol of British philosophers in the early 1960s, which has little to recommend it. He relies on interviews with John, an Oxford lecturer who spoke too frankly and unprofessionally to wish to be identified. And Mehta's dry presentation of stale data in his 1970 article on Calcutta's poverty is relieved only by his brief look at some early criticisms of Mother Teresa (e.g., her lack of medically trained staff and her grandstanding acceptance of only the most extreme and dramatic cases ). Too many pieces here are too mired in the time when they were written to endure. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationVed Mehta is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. He was a staff writer on The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994 and has taught literature and history at half a dozen colleges and universities, including Williams, Vassar, and Yale. He is the author of an autobiographical series of books with the omnibus title Continents of Exile, of which the eighth book, Remembering Mr. Shawn`s New Yorker, has just been published. Among his other books are Portrait of India, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, and Rajiv Gandhi and Rama`s Kingdom, all obtainable from Yale University Press. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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