Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times. [Hardcover]

Amitav. Ghosh (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company (2005)
• ASIN: B000TA5EES
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction, travel writing, and journalism, his books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous novel, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. Recently published there, The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad. Ghosh has won France's Prix Medici Etranger, India's prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some excellent writing, October 12, 2006

By 

Sevile (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (Hardcover)

This book is a collection of essays, written from a variety of locations around the world for various magazines, over the past fifteen years or so, by the Indian journalist Amitav Ghosh. To my taste they were uneven in quality. The first piece in the book, covering the effects of the 2004 Tsunami on the Indian inhabitants of some islands to the southeast of the Indian mainland, is beautifully written, engrossing and stands out as a masterpiece. It was very worthwhile reading a piece about life in India by a gifted Indian writer.

I learned a good deal from a number of the other pieces as well. However the quality of the pieces seems to go down in relation to the distance Ghosh is removed from what he knows best (India and Indians), he has a habit of trying a little too hard to have profound insights, and seems a little preachy at times. On the other hand, as someone from a different background, I found the book quite useful for improving my knowledge of Indian viewpoints on topics dealing with politics and society.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good piece, January 13, 2007

By 

Farseem Mohammedy (Hamilton, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (Hardcover)

A collection of articulate essays written at different times and on different places and about different experiences. Though the piece on 9/11 was disappointing. It lacks depths of the other essays. The reader gets a glimpse of different places, different people, different politics, and of course how the "incendiary circumstances" have changed/affected/moulded peoples lives across borders. A superb pastime reading indeed !