The Most Perfect Thing
By Tim Birkhead
Pages: 304
Thomas Wentworth Higginson once said “I think that, if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird’s egg.”
How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shape the way they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? How are the colours and patterns of an eggshell created? ‘A Bird’s Egg’ answers, as the journey of a bird’s egg from creation and fertilisation to its eventual hatching is examined.
Acclaimed ornithologist Tim Birkhead looks at the eggs of hens, cuckoos and many other birds, revealing weird and wonderful facts. Woven around and supporting these facts are extraordinary stories of the individuals who from as far back as Ancient Egypt have been fixated on the study and collection of eggs, not always to the benefit of their conservation.
Jaffna Street
By Mir Khalid
Pages: 464
In 1989, an adolescent schoolboy from downtown Srinagar watched as his elders extricated themselves from university campuses, high-school grounds, handloom machines and farms to bear arms and fight a war of attrition against the Indian state. Twenty-two years on, Jaffna Street was born from his explorations of the human dimension of the conflict appositely termed the Kashmir tragedy.
Combining anecdotes, personal memories and extended interviews, the author takes us behind the scenes and headlines into Srinagar city’s ‘notorious’ perpetually politically charged downtown as well as its upper cityside belt to create a panoramic portrait of recent Kashmir history. He profiles ordinary people-hitmen, insurgents, artisans, failed Marxist intellectuals, exiles, gangsters and ordinary individuals.
Revolution For Dummies : Laughing Through The Arab Spring
By Bassem Youssef
Pages: 304
The creator of The Program, the popular television show in Egypt’s history-chronicles his transformation from heart surgeon to political satirist, and offers insight into the Arab Spring, the Egyptian Revolution, and the turmoil roiling the modern Middle East Bassem Youssef’s incendiary satirical news program, Al-Bernameg (The Program), chronicled the events of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the fall of President HosniMubarak, and the rise of Mubarak’s successor, Mohamed Morsi. Youssef not only captured his nation’s dissent but stamped it with his own brand of humorous political criticism, in which the Egyptian government became the prime laughing stock and accused him of insulting the Egyptian presidency and
Islam.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
By Arundhati Roy
Pages: 464
Twenty years ago, Arundhati Roy wrote her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. In June 2017 will see Roy’s return to fiction with her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. ‘How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.’
In a city graveyard a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet between two graves. An excerpt: As a private joke, never the same two on consecutive nights. On a concrete sidewalk a baby appears quite suddenly, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter – No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts, but a million stars appeared in the east to herald her arrival. In a snowy valley, where tombstones grew through the ground like young children’s teeth, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people that attended her funeral.