| Book extracts: Page
1 | Page
2 | Page
3
 The
six pieces collected here for the first time have been chosen
by Ved Mehta from a decade of reportorial work for The New
Yorker. “They reflect, in different ways, he writes in
the foreword, “the worlds in which I feel at home: India,
where I was born and brought up; the United States and Britain,
where I have lived since I was fifteen; and what Milton called
‘the olive grove of Academe,’ where I spent an interlude
of almost nine years. The pieces are united by the ancient theme
of the tongue and the pen. . . .” Among the literate personages
Mr. Mehta writes about are the U.N. interpreter George Sherry
(“A Second Voice”); the English editor and broadcaster
Sir William Haley (“The Third”); the Oxford bookman
Sir Basil Blackwell (“Quiet, Beneficent Things”); the
Urdu translator and critic Ram Babu Saksena (“There Is No
Telling”); the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan (“The Train
Had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station”); and the American linguist
Noam Chomsky (“John Is Easy to Please”).
These men and many of their confreres who appear in the book
“might well be surprised to find themselves in the same room,”
Mr. Mehta writes. “They would have difficulty in understanding
one another’s manners, attitudes, and, in some cases, language.
The gathering would indeed be a bizarre one . . . but for me it
would be Heaven.” Mr. Mehta combines the literary exuberance
of the true writer with the intellectual rigor of the true scholar;
his style is marked by wit and sweep and fire. Since he joined
the staff of The New Yorker, he has established himself
as one of the magazine’s most imposing figures, and in this
book about encounters with virtuosos of the written and the spoken
word he has made a delightful addition to the pleasures of literacy.
Buy
this book
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
