The Hindu Business Line : We live in a beautiful place

What is the most impressive scene in outer space? This was one of the questions that a bunch of elementary school students posed, via amateur radio, to Sunita Williams. She said, “I think the most impressive scene up here is actually seeing the whole planet; it’s pretty impressive. We live in a beautiful place.” Then, the children wanted ‘a bit of advice for future astronauts’. Be adventurous, said Williams. “But again stay healthy and r emember not to take your health for granted. Always try to learn new things and you will go very far.”

Thankfully, you may not have to go very far to find Astronaut Sunita Williams by Aradhika Sharma and Capt S. Seshadri ( www.crosswordbookstores.com).

Traveller’s tales

Italy, 1514. That was when King Manuel I of Portugal presented Hanno, a white elephant from India, to Pope Leo X. Four years later, the pope was to receive a different present, this time from a Spanish pirate: ‘A captured North African traveller and diplomat from Fez named al-Hasan al-Wazzan.’

The captive diplomat “left behind in Italy many manuscripts, one of which, published in 1550, became a bestseller,” writes Natalie Zemon Davis in Trickster Travels ( www.faber.co.uk ).

A book you’d like to travel with… on a long, timeless journey.

Classical ruin

Norman Lebrecht brings to light ‘the secret life and shameful death of the classical record industry’ in Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness ( www.penguin.com ). “Sound recording had begun in 1877 with the inventor Thomas Alva Edison shouting ‘Mary had a little lamb’ into a phonograph and acquired a mass market in 1902 with the first brass-horn arias of the Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso,” narrates the author. The birth of recording as a musical act, separate and distinct from live performance, however, had to wait for almost two more decades. “One afternoon in 1920, a young pianist sat down in a shuttered room in the capital of defeated Germany and played a Bagatelle by Beethoven…”

Stirs up nostalgia.
Excessive choice

Two matters of seeming permanence, the Japanese economic recession and the Japanese passion for style, had together resulted in a deluge of massively under-priced, devastatingly trendy clothes, says Katie Kitamura in Japanese for Travellers ( www.penguin.com ). “Lost in this dizzying array of preferences, the wary shopper could never be sure of having the right one and was instead condemned to the perpetual uncertainty of peeling clothes on and off, squinting into the mirror, standing on tiptoe and hypothesising the outfit with heels, on a good hair day, in better light…”

Vivid description.

Tailpiece

“I used to think that ‘nuclear’ had something to do with King Lear…”

“Uh?”

“Till someone made it clear to me that the word is SMS for ‘new clear’!”

D. MURALI
http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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