Books

VLADIMIR: Let us not waste time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? (Estragon says nothing.) It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflection, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the … [Read more...] about The 100 best nonfiction books: No 29 – Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952/53)

Meanwhile, Plath had begun to put together the manuscript that became the framework for Ariel in early 1962. Restlessly focusing her poetic intention, she had changed its title from The Rival to A Birthday Present to Daddy to The Rabbit Catcher and finally to Ariel and Other Poems. She was now separated from Ted Hughes, whose affair with Assia Wevill had precipitated their break-up, and living alone with her two small children, Nick and Frieda, near Primrose Hill, London, in a house, 23 Fitzroy Road, once occupied by W B Yeats. By November 1962, she was done. … [Read more...] about The 100 best nonfiction books: No 17 – Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

To be a writer, especially a famous poet, in this war zone was to confront a challenge that was political, artistic and tribal. Both Heaney’s parents came from Roman Catholic families in Protestant Ulster. Throughout his life, his origins placed him at the lethal crossroads of sectarian conflict and Irish nationalism. That was an unenviable and dangerous location at the best of times, and he learned to become highly attuned to the history and heritage of oppression. He always contrived to move, as he put it, “like a double agent among the big concepts”. … [Read more...] about The 100 best nonfiction books: No 11 – North by Seamus Heaney (1975)

Science fiction has taken human loneliness to new, interstellar heights and depths, and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the greatest examples. It’s set in an icy world where individuals have no fixed biological sex; all are hermaphrodites, barring a few days a month when they enter a sexual state and can reproduce. The apparently unapproachable isolation of the narrator – a visiting male human, who is made alien and freakish by his being permanently male in this world – is slowly broken down by a long journey with one of the planet’s citizens, a disgraced politician in fear of his life. Love and the essential interconnectedness between all life forms trump even the species barrier here, and produce something beautiful and strange. … [Read more...] about Love, lifelines and Larkin: the best books to make you feel less alone

What is also needed is adequate help from the government or the voluntary sector to explain the scheme to beneficiaries or directly help them to access it. And cash transfers, the authors say, should be accompanied with other supporting welfare measures. The authors take an axe to a number of misconceptions and lies that vested interests have spread about the idea of cash transfers. The authors say that where cash transfers have been implemented, the poor have, by and large, not given up working, nor have they become alcoholics or drug addicts. … [Read more...] about Review | Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo’s new book presents poverty and migration in new light