by Aseem Gupta | Jun 30, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
The Bhagavad Gita begins at the moment when action has become almost impossible. Two branches of the same royal family stand ready for battle at Kurukshetra. Arjuna, one of the greatest warriors on the Pandava side, asks his charioteer Krishna to place their chariot...
by Aseem Gupta | Jun 6, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Augusten Burroughs’s A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2008, reaches backward from the chaotic adolescence depicted in Running with Scissors to the childhood that came before it. Its central figure is Burroughs’s father,...
by Aseem Gupta | Jun 4, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Albert Camus’s The Stranger, first published by Gallimard in 1942, is one of those rare novels whose apparent simplicity creates rather than resolves its difficulty. Its plot can be stated in a few sentences: Meursault, a clerk living in colonial Algiers, attends his...
by Aseem Gupta | Jun 2, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Thomas Keneally’s A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia tells the story of one of the strangest state-building experiments of the eighteenth century. Britain did not initially send a conventional colony of farmers, merchants, families, and...
