Incendiary Circumstances, Amitav Ghosh
Incendiary Circumstances, Amitav Ghosh
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Incendiary Circumstances
A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

Author: Amitav Ghosh

Narrator: Sam Dastor

Unabridged: 12 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/11/2023


Synopsis

A journalist who “illuminates the human drama behind the headlines” writes about today’s dramatic events, from terrorist attacks to tsunamis (Publishers Weekly).“An uncannily honest writer,” Amitav Ghosh has published firsthand accounts of pivotal world events in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and the New Yorker (The New York Times Book Review). This volume brings together the finest of these pieces, chronicling the turmoil of our times.Incendiary Circumstances begins with Ghosh’s arrival in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands just days after the devastation of the 2005 tsunami. We then travel back to September 11, 2001, as Ghosh retrieves his young daughter from school, sick with the knowledge that she must witness the kind of firestorm that has been in the background of his life since childhood.In his travels, Ghosh has stood on an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan; interviewed Pol Pot’s sister-in-law in Cambodia; shared the elation of Egyptians when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize; and stood with his threatened Sikh neighbors through the riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. In these pieces, he offers an up-close look at an era defined by the ravages of politics and nature.“Ghosh is the perfect chronicler of an increasingly globalized world . . . Reading [him] is a mind-expanding experience. Once you’ve finished this book, you’re very likely to press it into your friends’ hands and beg them to read it as well.” —Sunday Oregonian

About Amitav Ghosh

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. 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Daniel on March 24, 2011

Fantastic. This is the first book by Ghosh I have ever picked up, and rather than his normal fiction-fare, this is a collection of non-fiction essays. Most were particularly appealing to me as they combine ethnography, travel writing, and academic reflection on topics ranging from the history of the......more

Goodreads review by Rekha on October 21, 2007

I don't think there's an author I've admired more in the last few years then Ghosh, and this book more then bolsters my admiration. This collections of essays more or less spans the globe, and I think he has something vital to say from both an ethnographic perspective as well as a public intellectua......more

Goodreads review by Pam on July 08, 2020

Very good writer. Because of the nature of it, selections of essays written over a period of time, it didn't seem entirely unified to me. Also, a real downer in these times.......more

Goodreads review by William on October 29, 2015

Amitav Ghosh is best known (at least to me) as a writer of novels, but he also has, apparently, a fairly distinguished career as a journalist, and “Incendiary Circumstances” collects a number of the best examples of his non-fictional writing. As one might expect, they largely (though not entirely) f......more

Goodreads review by Parastou on April 16, 2008

The book's a collection of essays written over a nearly 20-year span (mid 80's to 2005). Some are just a few pages long, some are about 30 pages or more. The topics are diverse - a visit to a Tsunami-stricken island, a visit to Burma, Cambodia, the riots in New Delhi after the assassination of Indir......more


Quotes

“This absorbing collection of essays by the novelist, journalist, and travel writer Ghosh . . . covers some two decades of catastrophe and upheaval, from sectarian violence in his native India during the 1980s through the September 11 attacks. . . . to the recent Indian Ocean tsunami. Written in luminous prose with unusual understanding . . . an insightful look at a chaotic world.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review