Great Soul

Title: Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
Author: Joseph Lelyveld
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 978-0-307-26958-4

From the publisher: A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments—his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph Lelyveld shows in vivid, unmatched detail how Gandhi’s sense of mission, social values, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped on another subcontinent—during two decades in South Africa—and then tested by an India that quickly learned to revere him as a Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” while following him only a small part of the way to the social transformation he envisioned. The man himself emerges as one of history’s most remarkable self-creations, a prosperous lawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated to political and social action. Lelyveld leads us step-by-step through the heroic—and tragic—last months of this selfless leader’s long campaign when his nonviolent efforts culminated in the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing that ended only with his own assassination.

India and its politicians were ready to place Gandhi on a pedestal as “Father of the Nation” but were less inclined to embrace his teachings. Muslim support, crucial in his rise to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed untouchables—for whom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a whole—produced their own leaders.

Here is a vital, brilliant reconsideration of Gandhi’s extraordinary struggles on two continents, of his fierce but, finally, unfulfilled hopes, and of his ever-evolving legacy, which more than six decades after his death still ensures his place as India’s social conscience—and not just India’s.

From Geoffrey C. Ward in The New York Times: Lelyveld is especially qualified to write about Gandhi’s career on both sides of the Indian Ocean: he covered South Africa for The New York Times (winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book about apartheid, “Move Your Shadow”), and spent several years in the late 1960s reporting from India. He brings to his subject a reporter’s healthy skepticism and an old India hand’s stubborn fascination with the subcontinent and its people. read the full review

On Violence

Title: On Violence
Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156695008

From the publisher: We live amid escalating worldwide destruction and war. How do we make sense of it? In her enduring analysis of violence, Dr. Arendt point out that the glorification of violence is not restricted to a small minority of militants and extremists. The public revulsion for violence that followed World War II has dissipated, as have the non-violent philosophies of the early civil-rights movement. How did this reversal come about? And where will it lead us?

To answer these questions, Dr. Arendt puts theories about violence in historical perspective and re-examines the relationships between war and politics, violence and power. She questions the nature of violent behaviour, points out the causes of its many manifestations, and ultimately argues against Mao Tse-tung's dictum "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," proposing instead that "power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent."

Letters From Burma

Title: Letters From Burma
Author: Aung San Suu Kyi
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780141041445

From the publisher: In these unforgettable letters, Aung San Suu Kyi reaches out beyond Burma's borders to paint for her readers a vivid and poignant picture of her native land.

Here she celebrates the courageous army officers, academics, actors and everyday people who have supported the National League for Democracy, often at great risk to their own lives. She reveals the impact of political decisions on the people of Burma, from the terrible cost to the children of imprisoned dissidents - allowed to see their parents for only fifteen minutes every fortnight - to the effect of inflation on the national diet and of state repression on traditions of hospitality. She also evokes the beauty of the country's seasons and scenery, customs and festivities, that remain so close to her heart.

Through these remarkable letters, the reader catches a glimpse of exactly what is at stake as Suu Kyi fights on for freedom in Burma, and of the love for her homeland that sustains her non-violent battle.

Letter From Birmingham Jail

"I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 16th, 1963

Martin Luther King's famous letter is a response to a statement made by 8 white Alabama clergymen in 1963. They argued that injustice should only be fought in a law court. King responded that without non-violent direct action, true civil rights could never be achieved. He asserted that not only was civil disobedience justified in the face of unjust laws, but that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." The letter includes the famous statement "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," as well as the words attributed to William Gladstone quoted by King: "Justice too long delayed is justice denied." Read the full text of the letter here


Title: A Testament of Hope
Author: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780060646912

From the publisher: "We've got some difficult days ahead," civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis's Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968. "But it really doesn't matter to me now because I've been to the mountaintop. . . . And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

These prohetic words, uttered the day before his assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his "promised land" of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last twelve years of his life.

These words and other are commemorated here in the only major one-volume collection of this seminal twentieth-century American prophet's writings, speeches, interviews, and autobiographical reflections. A Testament of Hope contains Martin Luther King, Jr.'s essential thoughts on non-violence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more.