Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis by Helen Kazantzakis ;

Published byzantakis Simon and Schuster ; Pages 589 ;

Price US $ 12/-

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The world over many are aware of Zorba the the Greek—especially after the film where Anthony Quinn performs the role of Zorba and dances delightfully. But very few are aware of the author Nikos Kazantzakis ---who is a rich and powerful writer.

What Kazantzakis wrote about Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”------"it is all wind, sea, light, joy""--is applicable to his work as well. "Kazantzakis was to believe more and more in the omnipotence of the spirit: If one knows how to desire a thing, one obtains it. One even creates it out of the void. . ." .

The book under review is written by his wife and is based on his letters to her and to his friends, reproductions of which fill up much of the text. In essence, this "spirit" mentioned above was embodied in Kazantzakis’s Grecian heritage, Christianity, and the idea of world revolution. Kazantzakis spent a great deal of his life in salvation-minded journeys through contemporary history: Lenin's Russia, the Spanish Civil War, the eruptions in Asia. It is the contradictory pull between his own ravaging individualism and his commitment to the masses that has made him seem intellectually suspect. Kazantzakis remains less a modern figure than a nineteenth-century giant attempting to stave off the technological era.

Kazantzákis was born during the period of revolt of Crete against rule by the Ottoman Empire, and his family fled for a short time to the Greek island of Náxos. He studied law at the University of Athens and philosophy under Henri Bergson in Paris. He then travelled widely in Spain, England, Russia,Egypt, Palestine, and Japan, settling before World War II on the island of Aegina. He served as a minister in the Greek government and worked for Unesco. He then moved to France.

Kazantzákis’ works cover a vast range, including philosophic essays, travel books, tragedies, and translations into modern Greek of such classics as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust.He produced lyric poetry and the epic Odyssey, a sequel to the epic of Homer--- that expresses the full range of Kazantzákis philosophy.He became famous, however, during the last years of his life, when he turn to prose. He is best known for his widely translated novels. They include Zorba the Greek, a portrayal of a passionate lover of life and poor-man’s philosopher;Freedom or Death, a depiction of Cretan Greeks’ struggle against their Ottoman overlords in the 19th century;The Greek Passion; andThe Last Temptation of Christ, a revisionist psychological study of Jesus.

Kazantzakis, much more of a philosopher than a writer, was deeply influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Bergson, and the philosophies of Christianity, Marxism and Buddhism.

His book, The Last Temptation of Christ, was considered quite controversial when first published in 1955, and prompted angry reactions from both the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church.

In 1956, in Vienna, he was awarded the International Peace Award.

He died in 1957 in Germany and is buried on one of the bastions of the Venetian fort surrounding Iraklion.

The 50th anniversary of the death of Nikos Kazantzakis was selected as main motif for a high value Euro collectors' coins; the €10 Greek Nikos Kazantzakis commemorative coin, minted in 2007.

He published his first work, the romantic novella Serpent and Lily (1906), shortly after receiving his law degree. Kazantzakis began to concentrate his energies on the completion of his most ambitious work, the massive verse epic The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. Having created the first version of the poem between 1924 and 1927, he completely rewrote it four times in the next eleven years, altering the content to reflect his own disillusionment with political solutions as well as his increasing concern for the spiritual well-being of modern humanity.

Already well known as a political activist, cultural ambassador, and translator, Kazantzakis gained popular success as a novelist with the publication of Zorba the Greek in 1946. The author, professed a deep admiration for Zorba, whom he felt “possessed ‘the broadest soul, the soundest body, and the freest cry I have known in my life.” The novel's narrator is accepted by critics as Kazantzakis's self-portrait as an artist and philosopher.

The controversy regarding Kazantzakis's heterodox Christianity began with the publication of his next novel,The Greek Passion, in which the modern Christian church is depicted as an ossified institution that has ceased to embody the teachings of Christ. Kazantzakis further developed this theme with The Last Temptation of Christ , a psychological study of Jesus. A surrealistic fictional biography of Christ, whom Kazantzakis considered to be the supreme embodiment of man's battle to overcome his sensual desires in pursuit of a spiritual existence, the novel focuses on what Kazantzakis imagines as the psychological aspects of Jesus's character and how Christ overcomes his human limitations to unite with God.

Despite harsh criticism of his theological viewpoint, Kazantzakis enjoyed popular and critical acclaim throughout this latter portion of his career, and in 1957, the year of his death from complications of lymphoma, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Kazantzakis's writing is often appraised as a single body that reveals the author's philosophical and spiritual values. Most critics agree that his writings are at least partially autobiographical. But although Kazantzakis's works seek to reconcile the dualities of human nature—mind and body, affirmation and despair, even life and death—some critics have suggested that the author's ultimate concern lies more in striving to overcome inherent human conflicts than in resolving them.

Critics suggest that philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson strongly influenced Kazantzakis's thought. Both Serpent and Lily, which focused on a young man's struggle to balance the physical and spiritual elements of his love for a woman, and The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, an essay in which the author explains his early philosophical concerns, display these influences.

Late in his career, Kazantzakis explored the spiritual plight of mankind. This concern is most explicitly manifested in Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. In the former, Kazantzakis presented two characters who exemplify the poles of the conflict, Zorba representing a sensual figure, while the man known as “the boss” embodies more high-minded traits. In The Last Temptation of Christ, the conflict is portrayed as the essential dilemma of Christ, who is torn between his wish to serve God and his physical appetites. Characteristically, Kazantzakis does not attempt to present a resolution to the sensual-spiritual conflict in these novels. Zorba and his boss learn from their exchange of ideas but part essentially unchanged, while Christ, even as he is sacrificing himself on the cross, dreams of leading the sensually satisfying life of an ordinary man.

Kazantzakis is an outstanding thinker and a great thinker who fought for what he believed in.

P.P.Ramachandran

24/05/2020.

 R. C.DUTT

An Indian for All Seasons R.C. Dutt by Meenakshi Mukherjee; Published by Penguin Books ;Pages 385; Price Rs. 399/-.

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Meenakshi Mukherjee was Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies.

She was member of the University Grants Commission’s National Panel for English and Western Languages. Most significantly, she was Chairperson of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS) .

Among her books are The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India and Jane Austen. She received the Sahitya Akademi award for her book ‘The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English’. Mukherjee’s clarity of voice,passion, commitment and intelligence are exceptional.

The book under review is a comprehensive biography of Romesh Chandra Dutt --one of the stalwarts in Indian history . He was born in 1848 and died in 1909.Barely 20 years old, without informing his family, Dutt went on a slow boat from Calcutta to Diamond Harbour and thence caught a steamer to London. To study and compete for the ICS, “the heaven-born service.” Sailing with him were Behari Lal Gupta and Surendranath Banerjee. All the three cleared I C S.

Dutt was among the first Indians to clear the I. C. S examination (in 1869) and worked for the Indianisation of the Civil Services. After retiring from service, he became actively involved in the nationalist movement. In 1899, he was made the President of the Indian National Congress and as such, presided over the Lucknow session.

As a scholar, Dutt conducted pioneering research in the field of economy, particularly on issues such as poverty of cultivators, famines, indigenous industries and impact of high taxes His famous works include. The Economic History of British India, India in the Victorian age, and History of Civilisation in Ancient India.

Influenced by the Pabna agitation of the peasants, the inequities imposed on them by Indigo planters, and the unspoken complicity and nexus between the landlords and the colonial administration Dutt wrote the tract “The Peasantry of Bengal” which was published in 1874. That was also the year of the famine and two years later came the terrible cyclone that hit the deltaic region of Bengal.

When Dutt was deeply involved in organising relief, he was called away to Barisal to assist in the festivities on January 1, 1877 to mark Queen Victoria assuming the title “Empress of India”.

Considering the plight of the cyclone victims, the administration could not have been more insensitive. Other postings followed and he served as the District Officer in Pabna and Mymensing. In 1894, he was appointed Commissioner of the Burdwan Division, probably the first Indian native to officiate in that capacity though only for a year. In 1897, he took early retirement from the ICS.

Dutt's 26 years of government service was also marked by furloughs to England for extended periods when he did a fair amount of study and writing. By then, he had also become acquainted with the leading figures of the London Indian Society formed by Dadabhai Naoroji in 1865.

Post-retirement, he plunged into writing and public speaking, quite often in support of the members of the London Indian Society or the East Indian Association contesting elections to the House of Commons. He also served as the London Correspondent for a Calcutta journal--The Indian Mirror. In 1899, he became the President of the Indian National Congress--Lucknow.

As Finance Minister and Dewan of Baroda State, Dutt struck a constructive relationship with the ruler, Sayaji Rao Gaekwad, and this facilitated the ushering in of administrative reforms and welfare measures — for instance, compulsory education, the library movement, prevention of child marriage, local-self-government, and separation of the judiciary from the executive.

His tenure as the Dewan of Baroda, however, was not to last long. At an official banquet in honour of the visiting Lord Minto, he suffered a heart attack and died soon thereafter.

He was the first of his race to attain the rank of divisional commissioner, and long before his retirement, at the end of twenty-five years' service, had made a high reputation as an administrator. He sat for a time in the Bengal Legislative Council, and, in recognition of his official work, received the Companionship of the Indian Empire.

Dutt is remembered for his monumental work, The Economic History of India, and his translation of the Rig Veda in Bengali. He sought to strike a balance between liberalism and the Hindu traditions. Some of his acclaimed works are 'Three Years In Europe', ' Literature'. Four authentic books in Bengali were 'Banga Bijeta', 'Madhabi Kankan', 'Rajput Jiban Sandha' and 'Maharastra Prabhat'. He wrote two social books 'Samaj' and 'Sangsar'.

He wrote in Bengali poems and plays, historical and social novels, and aroused a storm of protest within the orthodox community of his Province by publishing a Bengali translation of the Rig Veda. In English, of which he had complete mastery, his first complete essay was a History of Civilisation in Ancient India, which fulfilled a useful purpose in its day. Freedom from Government service gave him the opportunity he set himself to writing the Economic History of India and India in the Victorian Age. Apart from this, the work of Dutt is valuable mainly in that it has helped to reveal to his own people the spiritual riches of ancient India. Social scientists remember Dutt for his two-volume Economic History of India, and Mukherjee quotes the economist, D.R. Gadgil, who described these volumes as “in essence, a preview of what later came to be called the economics of colonialism”. For readers of Bengali, Dutt is the author of four historical novels. There are those who know him through his writings in English — through his abridged verse-translation versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

This rich biography, which coincided with his death centenary, illuminates the remarkable journey of Romesh Chunder Dutt situated at the cusp of two centuries and two world views. Featuring Curzon, Naoroji, Vidyasagar, Bankimchandra, Gokhale, Sayaji Rao Gaekwad and other luminaries of the national movement, this meticulously researched and elegantly written book captures an extraordinary moment in modern Indian history and will be enjoyed by a wide range of readers.

The fact that Dutt had such a dizzying range of interests, and led so many lives in one life attracted Mukherjee who sees Dutt’s life as “a prism which refracts the relationships between the West and India, colonialism and nationalism, elite and subaltern Indians, literature and history and much else”. But, above all, this is a biography that portrays a remarkable individual and it succeeds in weaving together the different lives Dutt led.

P.P.Ramachandran.

17/05/2020.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Einstein The Life and Times by Ronald Clark ;Published by Harper ; Pages 896; Price U.S. $ 25/95.

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The book under review is a biography of Albert Einstein. The author Ronald Clark was a British author of biography, fiction and non-fiction. He was a war correspondent during the Second World War and followed the war until the end, and remained in Germany to report on the major War Crimes trials. Clark has written excellent biographies of J. B. S. Haldane, the Huxleys and Henry Tizard.

When his parents moved to Italy in 1893, Einstein dropped out of school and renounced both his German citizenship and his Jewish faith. He applied to study at the Zurich Polytechnic, an advanced Swiss technical institute. However, he failed the entrance examinations and was not accepted until spending a year of preparation at a Swiss secondary school. Between 1896 and 1900, he participated in a teachers' training program at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he met his lifelong friends Marcel Grossman and Michele Angelo Besso, as well as his first wife, Mileva Maric. Following the completion of his program in 1900, Einstein went on to work as a teacher and tutor in a series of posts in Germany and Switzerland. He finally settled in Bern, Switzerland, in 1902, where he received a job as a technical expert in a patent office.

For most of Einstein's life, he worked as a University Professor. He began at the University of Bern in 1909, but also taught at Prague and Zurich before ultimately settling at the University of Berlin and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1915. Although his wife Mileva and their sons initially lived in Berlin with him, the couple separated shortly thereafter and in 1919 obtained an official divorce. Einstein remarried that same year, to his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, and lived with her until her death in 1936.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Einstein became increasingly active in politics and international affairs. He was a strong supporter of Zionism and travelled on a lecturing tour to the United States in 1922 to raise money on behalf of a new Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In addition to his Zionism, Einstein was also a militant pacifist. He was critical of nationalism and committed to the idea of a single world government without any need for armed forces. Throughout the 1920s, he participated in numerous peace campaigns and wrote articles on international peace and disarmament. However, when Hitler's National Socialist party came to power in Germany in 1933, Einstein began to rethink his rigid pacifist stance. When the Nazis began targeting him in their anti-Semitic propaganda, Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and accepted a full-time position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Einstein departed further from his pacifism during World War II, when he actively participated in the war effort, working for the US Navy and writing a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, in which he urged him to accelerate the nation's nuclear weaponry development. However, Einstein never advocated the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and worked until his death in 1955 in a campaign for international peace and nuclear disarmament.

Einstein's greatest contributions to physics were his synthesis of mechanics and electrodynamics through his relativity theory, and his challenge to Newtonian physics through his quantum theory.

Einstein's achievements influenced philosophy, art, literature, and many disciplines. Einstein transformed the image of the scientist in the twentieth century. He was far more than the physicist who confidently claimed that space and time were not what they seemed to be. He passionately indulged in pacifism, and as passionately rejected it when Hitler began to show that he really meant what he said about the Jews and the master race.
Clark has drawn an extraordinarily moving portrait of a man who was one of the great tragic figures of our time. It is the picture of a man who while still young abandoned much of life with the passion of the convinced monastic, and who was thrust back into it by the unobliging pressures of history. And in science the greatest physicist of three centuries, or possibly of them all, found himself after middle age pushed by the advance of quantum mechanics into a backwater, "a genuine old museum-piece," as he himself wrote.

Clark has drawn on a immense amount of new material. But he has never lost sight of the man who was one of the greatest contradictions of our times: the German who hated the Germans; the pacifist who changed his mind; the ambivalent Zionist who was asked to head the Israeli state; the physicist who believed in God.

Einstein’s life since the very beginning, his hatred towards Germany, his work in Switzerland and then academics in Germany again, his family leniency towards religions and spirituality, his love for physics, his journey during world wars and inclination towards Zionism in later years of life is all majestically portrayed in the book.

Einstein summarised his feelings about his role in the creation of the atomic bomb—a little before he died:

“I made one great mistake in my life… when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification – the danger that the Germans would make them.”

Sixty five years after his death , Einstein is remarkably alive in contemporary science. His work is still the acknowledged base of new research results in an astonishing variety of problems in physics, cosmology and to some extent also in chemistry.

During the last decade it has turned out that some of the most exciting frontiers lie exactly in that branch where Einstein, with few followers but with the obstinacy of a prophet, did his work in his last decades, namely in general relativity theory.

Today's theory of knowledge carries his fingerprints, partly because his early publications on relativity and quantum physics helped shape the modern style of doing science—moving ahead with daring, free imagination, but keeping one's rope anchored in a few places to the rock of basic principle.

Einstein's chief importance today lies in the fact that his legacy still provides much of the power and direction for modern science and epistemology. ”

Clark offers details of the all--too--familiar story.

He regale us with anecdotes about Einstein's lively wit and independence. There is a cast of thousands, kings and commoners who happened to interact with Einstein and who shared with him the elations and horrors of the first half of the last century.

There is also a special chapter on Einstein's role in alerting Roosevelt in August, 1939, to the possibility realistically perceived,--- as it turned out—that the Germans would combine their scientific headstart on nuclear fission work with their access to uranium ore and their ambitions for world conquest and so would be tempted to make a nuclear weapon that, on scientific principles, was generally known to be a possibility.

However, the world was going into a nuclear age whether or not Einstein had signed the letter to Roosevelt. Ironically, after December, 1941, Einstein was carefully kept insulated from research on the A‐bomb — “in view of the attitude of people here in Washington who have studied his whole history,” . Einstein got wind of what went on, enough to worry greatly about a postwar weapons race. His plan was to inform and rally scientists in the major countries to press for the internationalisation of military power and Clark.

Emerging from Clark's Einstein is seen as a towering, creative figure in science and history of science.

One one occasion connected with the Nobel Prize in 1922, Einstein had to furnish an essay about himself for official publication. He wrote only 14 lines. In 1946 he wrote his famous “Autobiographical Notes”—and devoted virtually all his space to his conceptual development in science and epistemology. Therefore it is an autobiography containing the names of such intellectual ancestors as Hume, Kant and Mach, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell but not of any of his family relatives.

While Einstein's science is proverbially difficult, the essence of Einstein's discoveries is in fact accessible without much mathematics.

Einstein's character was full of ambiguities, tensions and polarities which sometimes produced results that now make amusing reading. Einstein's disinterest in making quite sure he will not turn up incorrectly dressed for some formal occasion is not unrelated to his ability to adopt an unconventional point of view when it is needed to expose the key fault in some hoary old problem of science.

There is of course the folkloric image itself—that of the wisest of old men, who even looked as if he had witnessed Creation itself, but who at the same time also is the almost Childlike person. There is the legendary ability to concentrate, often for years, on a single basic problem, regardless of contemporary schools or fashion; and, opposite to that, is his ever‐ready openness to deal, after all, with the barrage of requests for help and personal involvements that appealed to his fundamental humanity and vulnerability to pity.

Einstein is the apostle of rationality, characterised by clarity of logical construction. His personal philosophy, of liberal agnosticism and his withering contempt for established religious authority of any sort are well‐known—and, at the same time, he has also a clear personal religiosity. As he says in one of his letters: “I am a deeply religious unbeliever.”

The key to his genius. may well lie in the mutual correspondence between his style in thought and act on one side and the chief unresolved puzzles of contemporary science on the other.

To one of his assistants, Einstein said: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”

The legendary simplicity of the man was an integral part of his personality.

This is an outstanding biography of a great scientist and a greater human being.It is noteworthy for its precision and perception

P.P.Ramachandran

10/05/2020.

STEVE  JOBS

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson ; Published by Little Brown; Pages 630 ; Price Rs.799/-

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Walter Isaacson is the President of the Aspen Institute and past Editor of Time. He is biographer extraordinaire and famous for his biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin. The book under review is the biography of Steve Jobs.

It is based on over forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues. It is the compelling story of an extraordinary life and the absolutely intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionised six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Jobs is the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to marry creativity with technology. His company exemplified leaps of imagination combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Jobs cooperated with the writing of this book and put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unalloyed view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that was the result.

One quality of Jobs is very evident. He was a control-freak. On one occasion he was recovering from a liver transplant and pneumonia. The pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask so that he could pick a design he liked.

The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching a startup in his parents’ garage and building it into the world’s most valuable company. According to Isaacson Jobs wasn't a visionary or even a very talented electronic engineer. But he was a businessman of astonishing flair and focus, a marketing genius, and had an intuitive sense of what the customer would want before the customer had any idea. He was obsessed with the products, rather than with the money: happily, as he discovered, if you get the products right, the money will come.

We have the portrait of an exceedingly complex and amazing man who created Apple and some of the most important technology products of this century. In many ways, the Jobs of the early ’80s at the outset of his breathtaking career is the same feisty and impetuous man we find at the end of his life.

Jobs drove those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. The book is replete with lessons on innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Jobs declared proudly that he didn’t "have any skeletons" in his "closet that can’t be allowed out". One example which was well-documented in the media at the time and which gets several pages of attention in the book is the issue of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems. The story is significant . The band of steel around the edge of the phone was never a big hit with Apple’s engineers, who warned that it could cause reception problems. But Apple’s SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs, insisted that the engineers could figure out how to make it work, to the point that they resisted putting a clear coating of varnish on the band to make problems less likely. When problems arose Jobs took the entire situation, going so far as to adamantly suggest that Apple simply ignore the issue, because in his mind, there was no problem. Only when Tim Cook implored him to face facts did Jobs decide to hold a press conference and offer solutions.

It is sad to read of Jobs’s depression and anger on the evening following the debut of the iPad. Isaacson writes "as we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone." In this and every launch, Jobs took the products, and their reception, very personally. In every phase of development, from inception to advertisements, he was a dictator, and people who reacted badly or were underwhelmed simply didn’t get it. The book is full of such personal perspectives in the timeline of Jobs and Apple.

Jobs’s many achievements are tallied in detail — the Macintosh, Pixar, the iMac, the iPhone, the iPad . Jobs was totally involved from beginning to end in the creation of these products and companies — even during the years in which he was gravely ill — This is a testament to his work ethic, his creativity, and his genius. Jobs’s fantastic career was born out of his harsh, demanding attitude, rather than in spite of it.

The book also emphasises Jobs’s belief, that everything should be in his control from the word Go. The stubborn surety was that he knew what was right for himself and everyone else.

One of the true revelations of the book is that Steve Jobs cried — a lot, and in the presence of his co-workers. From the earliest days of his career when he cried to Steve Wozniak’s father Jerry about getting Woz to come work at Apple full time, he was in tears regularly when frustrated, when cornered, when happy or touched, and when angry. Though his return to Apple did seem to bring some temperance and evenness to his management efforts, Jobs never stopped openly crying when emotion overwhelmed him.

The sections where Bill Gates appear are the most touching and underlines the great difference between the two giants. On the success of the iPad, Gates tells Isaacson, "Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and Steve is still coming up with amazing new products," adding, "Maybe I should have stayed in that game" .

Throughout the book, Jobs is incredibly cutting about various friends, former colleagues, business associates, and even celebrities.

Jobs the man is consistent throughout, expressing little regret or dissatisfaction with himself, except for his repeated wish that he had spent more time with his children, who, he says, were his main motivation for cooperating with and encouraging that a biography be written at all.

Isaacson glues together hundreds of snippets, anecdotes, quotes and short stories from Jobs’ life to form a mesmerising tale .

There are many chapters and passages which explore his personal life. Undoubtedly this book is an utterly charming collection of fascinating stories of Jobs eccentricities.

Jobs was a visionary as ruthless and driven as any of the great first-generation American capitalists and his story is one of the foremost tales from America .

P.P.Ramachandran.

03/05/2020

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Imp P. S.

Jobs travelled to India  in the summer of 1974 to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram, in search of spiritual enlightenment. However, when he got to the Neem Karoli ashram it was basically deserted after Neem Karoli had died earlier in the year. Then he made a long trek up a huge dry riverbed to an ashram of Hariakhan Baba .Jobs left India after staying for seven months and returning to the US  with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life".

BENJAMIN  FRANKLIN

Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson ; Published by Simon and Schuster ; Pages 590 ; Price U.S. $ 30/-

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Benjamin Franklin ( 1706--1790) ranks among the greatest Americans. Physically he resembled Dicken’s avuncular Pickwick---being bald and cuddly and became the most beloved of the Founding Fathers.

At the end of the book, Isaacson has neatly summarised the achievements of Franklin.

"Franklin’s belief that he could serve God by serving his fellow man may strike as mundane, but it was in truth a worthy creed that he deeply believed and faithfully followed. He was remarkably versatile in this service. He devised legislatures and lightning rods, lotteries and lending libraries. He sought practical ways to make stoves less smoky and commonwealths less corrupt. He organised neighbourhood constabularies and international alliances. He combined two types of lenses to create bifocals and two concepts of representation to foster the nation’s federal compromise. As his friend, the French statesman Turgot said in his famous epigram, he snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

He was a phenomenal inventor especially of items of use for the common man. He bettered the designs for urinary catheters and storage batteries. Immanuel Kant called him "the new Prometheus" because of his experiments with kites and lightning. For this work, he was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal by the Royal Society - the first person living outside Britain to be honoured in this way. He was responsible for the first lending library and the first fire department. He displayed skill as a diplomat and forged an alliance between America and France He helped writing the US constitution in 1787. 

His autobiography is an all-time classic book.

Franklin was a professional accomplisher, making money in several business ventures, including publishing and real estate, organising the US postal service, politicking endlessly, crisscrossing the Atlantic as a diplomat extraordinaire, having dalliances with women young and old, charming kings and queens, exhausting his relatives and friends.

This latest attempt in writing his biography is by Walter Isaacson, a former Editor of Time, currently Aspen Institute President .

The book is a lively, readable and joyous book. Isaacson admires his subject deeply, and makes us admire him.

In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin’s life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the runaway apprentice who became, over the course of his eighty-four-year life, America’s best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard’s Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation’s alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.

In this colourful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin’s amazing life, showing how he helped to forge the American national identity and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century.

He provides a swift, entertaining narrative with just enough background material to make the story accessible to a wide audience.

According to him, Franklin has been vilified in romantic periods and lionised in entrepreneurial ones.

Franklin was a quintessential Enlightenment figure, who went down very well among the French of the 18th century, where his wit, his lack of dogmatism, his attachment to reason and his practical approach to life were immensely admired. He was sensibly regarded as a prototypical American, which was a new thing in this world in the late 18th century.

Franklin rose to eminence from fairly modest beginnings in Boston, the 10th son of the pious Josiah and Abiah Franklin, who indentured their precocious boy to an older brother, James, where he learnt the craft of printing.

Young Ben pretended that he had got a girl pregnant, escaping his brother's clutches on a ship to New York, from where he proceeded to Philadelphia in 1723 with only a single Dutch dollar in his pocket. He was 17 years old, with nothing but a decent knowledge of the printing business.

It was rags to riches from that point on. Ben networked like a fiend, quickly befriending the governor of the state, who employed him in various capacities. He set up a print shop, and soon owned a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette - the most widely read paper in the colonies. He wrote and self-published almanacs and books. He became, indeed, a mogul of sorts. Isaacson writes : "Franklin's print shop had by then grown into a successful, vertically integrated media conglomerate. He had a printing press, publishing house, newspaper, an almanac series and partial control of the postal system. The successful books he had printed ranged from Bibles and psalters to Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela . . . He also had built a network of profitable partnerships and franchises . Money flowed in, much of which he invested, quite wisely, in Philadelphia property."

Franklin at 42, only halfway through his life, retired from printing to become a world-famous scientist, inventor, public servant, administrator, diplomat, writer, wit and bon vivant. He also became a flirt, attracting a wide range of women, foreign and domestic.

Isaacson writes of Franklin's common-law marriage to Deborah Read. He settled in with her in 1730, unable to marry her because she had been previously married to an unreliable potter who absconded to the West Indies. Bigamy being a crime, Franklin protected himself by simply living with Deborah.

Franklin certainly adored his women. In a wry essay of 1745, "Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress", Franklin argues for the virtues of sleeping with older women. He lists many reasons for this preference.

He spent many years abroad without his wife, and was perceived in France as a successful womaniser.

The great triumph of Franklin's old age was, of course, his work at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. At 81, he played a central role in the drafting of that magnificent document, although he understood its flaws only too well. His withering last words to the convention suggest how fiercely independent, and prophetic he could be:

"I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the people if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."

He was, by consensus, the best writer in eighteenth-century America, as well as the nation’s first media tycoon and its shrewdest diplomat.

Isaacson is most fascinated with Franklin the social and political tactician—Machiavelli as transplanted to a young democracy . While Franklin was clearly delighted by himself—what a piece of work is Ben—being a genius was in some ways inconvenient, especially in those days when duels were fought over insults .

He wanted his public to believe that his virtuous virtuosity was the whole story, but his compulsive manipulativeness sometimes can have a sociopathic tinge.

In his treatment of his family, benign neglect is possibly the best that can be said. Franklin ignored his wife’s pleas to return to Philadelphia from London, where he lived without her for some ten years, even after she’d had a stroke.

Isaacson reminds us that Franklin essentially retired, wealthy and content, in his early 40s and devoted the rest of his days to doing acts of public good, pressing the cause of meritocracy in the service of “social mobility rather than an established elite” and furthering the cause of American independence at considerable risk to his property and person.

Franklin remains an ideal American type.

P.P.Ramachandran.

26/04/2020.

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