Book Review - War and Peace

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It would be about 8 or 9 years ago that i bought this book with the intention of reading it 'one day'. That day arrived when i took a break from my career, in January. Still, it took me more than 4 months to read War and Peace. That's after i set a deadline to finish it!

That makes it sound boring. Which is not exactly true. The book does have its boring bits, but it is interesting and entertaining for the most part. I would have rated it higher if it wasn't for the 'Epilogue II' - which is a take on things's inevitability vs. man's free will. Tolstoy confuses us to the point that one starts to think what's the meaning of it all - all meaning life itself, as well as the fact that you have almost read this tome of a book and come to the end of it, and you have set a deadline to finish it off, and this guy is telling you history really is inevitable and nothing to do with anyone's free will no matter what. So France would have invaded Russia in the early 19th century, with or without Napoleon; France would have had someone else. In any case, the result would have been the same, the French retreating after reaching Moscow, with or without Kutuzov and Alexander I doing anything on their part.

You don't really want a good book to end so morosely. So, leaving behind the unnecessary (but inevitable!) Epilogue II, the rest of the book is a page turner and (again i am insisting, like LT did in the whole novel about one thing or the other) should have ended at 'Epilogue I' with its happily ever after feel. Chronicling the lives of a handful of stately and rich people from around the year 1805 to 1820, when Napoleonic forces invaded Russia, it is a detailed commentary on the social and military setup of Russia during that time.

Of these people, some remain with you a long time after you have kept the book down. Prince Andrew, Princess Mary, Natasha, Sonya, Nicholas, Pierre, Denisov - the characters have been painted in vivid details and the tiniest clockwork of their minds laid bare. Their interactions and dialogues with each other further introduce you to their respective worlds and you get to know them all thoroughly. The novel touches upon a lot of areas - Freemasonry, extra marital affairs, balls and arranged alliances, love affairs, hunting (yes, hunting, with dogs), generals and their military strategies and how the strategies do not (and cannot) get executed. Then there is a long discourse on Napoleon and his not being a genius contrary to the public opinion at that time. There is also a long discourse on Kutuzov and history's lack of due recognition for him.

The novel is organized in various books, each one alternating with the themes of war and peace, and containing around 15-20 chapters. There are french sentences in between, duly translated.

While you would need time and patience to read this one, the feeling after the you've finished the book is one of triumph. For me specially since this one was on my list for the longest time!

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Book Review - Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, now at last I begin to understand why this author was awarded a Nobel.

The story's narrator is a young woman reminiscing about her school days. This is no ordinary school though, as the reader finds out page by page. You get the feeling that the story is somehow a science fiction, but the fact is never quite out there. It turns out to be a love triangle as well, while being deeply psychological.

While reading, one is also reminded time and again of the irony of retrospection. How things in the past seem different when you turn back from the present. How perspective changes with the passage of time and the advantage of knowledge.

To mess with the reader's head, the author does not deliberately reveal the narrator's background, but forces us to see her as a regular person.

Worth a read for the serious reader.

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Book review - Remains of the day

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Needless to say, picked this book up owing to the Nobel buzz, but was disappointed. Maybe I should reserve my comments before reading further work of the author. About the book itself, it's a good historical fiction fast-read. The setting is early to mid 20th century England, the political scenario described from the vantage of Lord Darlington's simplistic and loyal butler Stevens. There are many undertones to the narrative - the life of erstwhile aristocrats and their servants, hierarchy and ambitions of the manservants, the meaning of dignity, how loyalty drives someone to turn blind and deaf to what really is happening around, and extreme devotion to your profession among others. An enjoyable and fairly educative read if you forget the Nobel tag.
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Book review - The Lowland

A simple story. A few characters. Their growth over the years. This is what can sum up Jhumpa Lahiri's latest work. No surprise elements. Nothing really earth shattering. Ordinary people with some uncommon situations in their lives, some uncommon ways of reacting to those situations in their lives. This could be another summary.

Doesn't sound like much of a novel. But the way it grips your imagination is a proof of the sublimity of Lahiri's story-telling ability. The ability to weave stories about people around you, of someone who easily could have been you, is an art that this lady as mastered.

She takes you through the lanes of Calcutta to the marshes and beaches of Rhode Island with bits of California interspersed in between. Then back to Kolkata. All effortlessly. All as if you are actually present there all along. Powerful pictures painted by mere words. The details of a life uprooted from India and replanted in America. The feelings, the vantage, of a life begot in America, visiting India briefly. The nuances of oceanography, philosophy, the Naxalite movement of the '70s and even agriculture, all there for you to relish. Served within the story, intermixed as herbs in a savory delicacy.

With the same simplicity you get to meet and know Subhash, Udayan, their parents, Gauri, Bela, and Meghna - the Mitra family. Reading about their behavior, their individual traits and personalities, you get to understand them. In fact, you even begin to predict what they would think and do next. More often than not, they do end up doing your bidding.

In my teenage, which for some reason seems a lifetime ago, i would have panned the book for this same reason. Too predictable.

But now, i really appreciate it. Maybe now i am learning to understand the true value of human relationships, the true value of predictability. And savoring the joy of things turning out exactly the way you wanted them to be.

Book review - Doctor Zhivago

 Where do I begin? How does one go about reviewing such a tome of a work? Genre, you might say. Tell us about the genre. Is it fiction? Or historical fiction? Is it based on true events? Is it a biography of a real person? Well, it is all of them and none of them. Yet, as the tagline states, its the greatest love story ever told.

The story takes us through the life of Dr. Yuri Zhivago, a fictitious character who might have been any educated bourgeois (suited for a so-called white collared job, if such a thing existed in Russia back then) or the author himself.  Born at the turn of the 19^th century, Yuri is a firsthand witness to the Russian revolution of 1905, the October revolution of 1917 and the Civil War thereafter: arguably the most tumultuous time in the history of Russia. A period that also saw a war with Japan, the fall of the Tsars, the rise of the peasants and soldiers, a world war, and experimentation with forms of government – with  general chaos, dissent, atrocities, and complete upheaval of society in the country. 

Yurochka, unfortunately, is born to a wealthy merchant father who abandons him, and is left an orphan at an early age. Adopted by another wealthy household, the Gromyko’s, he studies medicine and marries Tonya Gromyko. Immensely thoughtful and artistically inclined, Yuri is also a poet and a philosopher who often does not think twice before speaking his mind - a quality that lands him in the soup many times. Living in Moscow, he first starts practicing medicine, but then serves as a military doctor in war.  Afterwards, the family relocates to Yuryatin where Tonya’s maternal grandfather was once a steel magnate.  Here, due to lack of any other means of sustenance, the family is forced to do farming to survive. Occupied in physical labor during all summer time, Yuri finds time to write his musings only during winter.

He is then abducted by a revolutionary group, The Forest Brotherhood, to tend to their sick and wounded, and reluctantly ends up being the leader’s confidant. During all these years and in his various journeys from place to place, Zhivago encounters the married yet single mother Lara Antipova every now and then, and eventually falls madly in love with her. So much so that on escaping from the Brotherhood, he first goes to Lara before taking stock of his own family. The story ends with Yuri’s death and a heart rending epilogue thereafter.

While there is no doubt about the genius and depth of the novel and the priceless glimpse it offers in the history of early 20^th century Russia, it does have its shortcomings. The first and foremost that struck me was the complexity of names of the characters and the myriad relationships they have with each other. Then there are a lot of coincidences and the same characters keep propping up from time to time in various different settings. Though we can attribute this to artistic freedom, at times it makes the reader realize that it is a fictional account after all, and tends to undermine the credibility of the novel’s epic nature.

With all that said, Dr. Zhivago is unquestionably the greatest historical fiction I have come across till date. Initially this book was not allowed to be published in its native Russia. The content was deemed inappropriate by the Communist party since it presented the alternate and ugly face of the revolution. The manuscript had to be smuggled out of the country and found the light of day in Italy in the year 1957. The powerful narrative, and the fact that such few works of art (or even news) came out from Russia during that time, won Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. The Russian government prohibited the author from accepting the prize and he was threatened with arrest and torture. Pasternak bowed to this pressure and refused to accept the award. Though this avoided his arrest, but it was not enough to thwart the threat of his expatriation to the West. It is said that the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (himself an author and connoisseur of art) then intervened to save the patriot Pasternak from exile.

This is the only novel Boris Pasternak ever got published in his lifetime. It was only in 1988 that his son was allowed to travel to Sweden and collect the Nobel on his late father’s behalf.

Book Review - The Sea, The Sea

How do you start to review a work of fiction that touches the deepest of deep gorges inside your mind so much so that you read and reread sentences, passages, pages to really understand them, make some sense out of ordinary situations made bizarre by the workings of human psyche, but are still left baffled....more confused than ever?

I mean the above as the best compliment I could give the author, Iris Murdoch. Sample this –

“We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.”

The book, written in first person, is a memoir of a fictional character, Charles Arrowby, who is a famous theatre director from London and has retired from his world of glamour to live a quiet life besides the sea writing his memoirs. So as we start reading, we are actually taken through the process of Charles preparing to write his story in his own words, and then the story itself, in the way he wants to unfold it. In between, we can also find the ramblings of Charles’ mind, analyzing what he has written so far!

So we get to know all that he is thinking, random thoughts about his past, present, future, about the people in his life, and most importantly, about his childhood first love, who he accidentally meets during his stay at the sea. Will she come back to him? Did she ever love him? Did he really ever love her or for all these years just kept this fantastic idea in his head that she was indeed his first love? Did her husband want to kill Charles? Who, if any, was Charles’ real soul mate? Should he have cared for her more? In short, some mind-boggling stuff. Feelings that cannot be fully expressed, told in words that defy definitions. Unrequited loves. Destroyed lives. Weird men and women. Twisted relationships. Spirituality. Internal Gods and Demons. Misplaced trust. Reckonings and disbelieves. Madness. Can one ever know true intentions?

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final; they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”

If you are confused in life, read this book. It will reassure you that most people also are.

If you are not confused in life, don’t read this book. It will surely confuse you, if you have the ability to understand emotions.

I plan to read it once again....maybe after a decade!

Book Review - Atlas Shrugged

“I swear by my life and the love of it, that I’ll never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

This oath, taken by the protagonist of the book ‘Atlas Shrugged’, beautifully sums up the theory of Objectivism founded by its author Ayn Rand and all that it stands for. The book is not just a work of fiction, but a representation of the virtues of rationality and self esteem that the movers of the world possess. Through its strong characters such as John Galt, Dagny Taggart, Francisco D’Anconia and others, and the interaction between them, the reader is slowly engrossed in not merely the story, but also its striking similarity with the world around us. The ultimate question is, what if the ones who carry the world on their shoulders shirk their responsibility and say that they can no longer be subordinated by the ones who don’t? What happens when all the innovative brilliant minds decide to go on a strike and build their own Atlantis somewhere else?

All this and more is covered in this tome of a book which does not shy away from asking difficult questions. The language is so simple, the characterization so vivid and the dialogues so deeply intense at times that the reader gets the feeling of being an actual part of the saga. While the only put down might be the 1000 odd number of pages the book goes on for, but that didn’t stop me from reading it twice!

This was overdue from long time ago....finally wrote it for a competition. And won.

Book Review - The Sense of an Ending

It starts with a group of slightly above average teenagers facing the same odds and ends as any other - that euphoria of having officially said good-bye to childhood and entering the adult phase, the same larger than life philosophical boasts - they talk as if they really understand what they are talking about. Midway, it turns into an existential debate on the morality of life and death, suicide in particular. But the end...its the end that leaves you thinking, or rethinking, about the past: your perceptions of the events that took place in your lifetime with the limited knowledge of the context, is that really what happened? The things you remember now, did they actually happen or are they just manifestations of what you believe happened? Were you so prejudiced about something, or someone, that you could not see what was in front of you all the time? And more such questions. And guilt. And remorse. 

Of course, or in the author's words, it is psychologically self evident that, all this happens to Tony, the protagonist who is also the narrator, but somewhere, we can see some reflections of ourselves in him. The author has beautifully woven a story with characters that seem like everyday people, with Tony candidly describing all that comes to his mind. The plot is gripping, to say the least, and offers a magnificent take on history - both personal and otherwise - and our interpretation of it. The language is rich, yet easy to understand.

But no matter how many questions it raises and attempts to answer, it is after all a  story, a brilliant one at that, which simultaneously mystifies and baffles you. That it makes you think, is an added advantage. Mr. Julian Barnes, you totally deserve that Man Booker you earned for this compelling work of fiction.

India Unbound

India Unbound by Gurucharan Das is a collectible for anyone interested in a comprehensive history of the Indian political and economic climate after independence. The author describes in an autobiographical way the major economical changes in the country, what exactly happened, when it happened, how it happened, why it should have happened earlier, how blessed we are to be living in the age when some positive changes did happen in the Indian economy - all this with little anecdotes about the lives of some great Indian businessmen, both past and contemporary.

The author, now a full time writer and occasional business consultant, was born in 1943 and in the beginning of this book tells us about our struggle for independence from the British from his grandfather’s perspective, painting a picture of what freedom really meant for the common people in general, and his family in particular. The author has studied Philosophy, Politics and Sanskrit at Harvard and it was there that he gradually understood the folly of state control and regulation over the commanding heights of economy and the advantages of free markets and competition. After graduation, he joined Richardson Hindustan Limited in India and got the chance to visit a lot of places in the heart of the country while promoting and looking for distributors of a new product of his organization - Vicks, now a household name in India. During this time, he could see how state regulations were in fact strangling new businesses and doing more harm than good to the country’s economic health. He also witnessed a rise in corruption as a direct result of the License Raj and the gigantic income tax rates. Later on he went on to become the CEO of Proctor & Gamble India and in this capacity came in contact of the likes of Tatas and Birlas and could not only understand, but could also empathize with the grim situation they faced in starting up new companies and expanding business empires in the country.

Mr. Das has beautifully woven all these experiences and more in his book, and believes that India and Indians became truly free, and not just politically independent, only after the reforms of 1991, since when the country is emerging as a strong economy with the rise of the middle class – the only way in which poverty can ultimately be rid of. The book concludes with a positive note about the progress of the country in the information age and the promise of a better future if the reforms continue.

The language is simple and easy to understand and the organization of the contents is in chronological order which takes us on a smooth journey of the author’s life and ideologies. All in all, being an honest and straightforward capitalist outlook on the political-economic-social scene in the country, this book is a must contemporary read.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

It’s a satirical novel about a group of people in constant fear of the "combine" (outside world) who are unaware of their own strengths, who don’t have courage enough to question rules and tradition; about people tagged as "different" with respect to the so called proper societal behavior traits. Amongst a bunch of such guys who refer to themselves as rabbits, comes a lion - who dares to be himself, who does not accept things as they are, who teaches them to live - not merely exist. And changes the world around them: by opposing the tyranny of the nurse who treats all these patients of the mental institution as her puppets...but alas…he himself gets lost in it.

The language is simple, narrated from the point of view of a (supposedly) deaf and mute patient of the mental asylum where the novel is set and he is in fact the one which ‘flies over the cuckoo’s nest’. All the characters are very well defined and the reader cannot help liking the protagonist, the one who makes the flying, or rather, ‘fleeing’ possible, in spite of the many shortcomings he has.

The book has long been established as a classic and made into a major Hollywood motion picture which bagged five Academy Awards in the year 1975.

My Toastmaster's speech 2 - "Writing Effective Reviews"

Its called "Organize Your Speech"

Good Afternoon friends. I am here to present my second prepared speech and the topic is "Writing Effective Reviews"

What is a review? By definition, it means a critical examination of something - now that something could be a book, a movie, a music album, a consumer product - just about anything. And by this definition, all of us are inherent reviewers. There are so many times when we give our feedback on many things for the benefit of friends and family. But there are some reviews that stay in mind and help us while deciding whether to buy or use a particular product or not - and why does this happen - due to the effectiveness of the review.

To illustrate, I would take the example of a book and try to explain how to go about writing its effective review. It’s a book that I read recently called The Audacity of Hope - the second book authored by Barack Obama, who now happens to be the President of the USA. If you noticed, I just made the introductory line of my review by mentioning the USP of the book, the name of its author. This means, your review should begin with the specialty of the book, could be its name, its storyline, plot or the fact that it has been adapted into a successful movie or that it was on the bestseller list for so many weeks.

Next comes the theme of the book along with its writing style, and how it is different from other books of the same genre. The Audacity of Hope is basically about politics - about the world in general and US in particular. It gives us a glimpse of the history of American politics, its current situation and dreams of the future. More importantly, it gives us an insight into the mindset of that person who is sitting on the hottest chair of the world as of now. The language is simple and easy to understand, and what makes it interesting is the author’s vivid description of his experiences while election campaigns, of being a senator of the opposition party, of being an African American amongst the predominantly white populace.

After outlining the theme and the writing style, we may write about the plot of the story and major characters if it is a fictional work. Otherwise, we can write something about the organization of the book. Like the Audacity of Hope is organized in 9 chapters ranging from republicans vs. democrats, the American constitution, their value system, religion, racism and the world beyond their borders. The final chapter is about Obama’s family, how they were his support throughout his career and how does he balance his personal and professional lives. Seems hard to believe, but even the President of USA has one.

Having so written about the book’s organization, we are now left with the conclusion of our review - and that is the tricky part. In the conclusion, you have to give your opinion about it without enforcing it on the reader. In this case I would write something like - all in all, The Audacity of hope is a good read for people who are interested in world politics and current affairs, even if they are not so much into non-fiction. But if you are looking for facts, figures or how Barack Obama reached the White House, you would be disappointed.

So, to summaries our book review process, we started off with an introduction mentioning some specialty of the book, then came the theme, writing style, plot, characters and organization. In the end we wrote the conclusion in such a way that it would help the reader decide whether the book is for him or not.

And now as the conclusion of this speech, I would like to inform you all that the Livewire team has decided to include a review section in the newsletter, wherein we request you all to write effective reviews and we are hoping to get a huge response - after all, I just dedicated my second speech to it, didn’t I? :-)

This speech took 7 minutes, body language was good, but rate of speech was again high and stresses and pauses were not effective. The topic was appreciated.

Don Quixote - Book Review

It works! My latest resolution is now fulfilled! Thanks to this blog of mine and my quixotic belief that I have got readers to whom I am answerable. Needless to say, it means I have finally finished reading Don Quixote. The quest had begun somewhere in the beginning of the year, and ends in futility now. Okay, now enough about me; this post is supposed to be a book review.

Very frankly, I am yet to figure out what is so great about this book. Right, it’s been written in the 16th century and is one of its kinds and all. It’s about a dreamer called Don Quixote who reads volumes of books about knighthood and fairy-tale endings and foolishly begins to believe in them. He adorns himself with armor, takes his skinny horse, and an assistant (or squire) and sets out in search of adventures. His first one happens to be a combat with windmills – which he supposes to be cruel giants – he even convinces his squire that those are indeed monsters masquerading as windmills, and ends up getting badly bruised. Obviously. Many such misadventures follow culminating in the breaking of many bones and teeth and subsequently his squire christens him as Knight of the Ill Favored Face.

Like all the heroes he has read about, Quixote feels he should also acquire a lady for whom he would pine (unnecessarily) and (attempt to) write sonnets. He idolizes a village girl as his damsel, names her the Lady Dulcinea and seeks greater adventures – like assuming an inn to be a castle (an ‘enchanted’ castle to top that), lamenting like a madman in the forest for his lost love (which is never acquired at the first place), fighting with bottles of wine in a slumber dreaming of enemies, assuming a herd of sheep to be opposing armies approaching in a battlefield (and is in dilemma on whose side he should be), and so on. His aim is to accomplish as many adventures as he has read of or even more, so that he would then be able to win his lady. Interesting thought.

But we have heard so much about Don Quixote at the windmills and it is so extensively referred to in various art and literary forms that actually reading the book (or rather, its translation – the actual book is written in Spanish by Cervantes) does not enrich you much. It also does not really entertain (unless 16th century Spain interests you) with its lords and ladies and inns and castles. There are many tales within tales about all the people who are gathered in the inn (the enchanted castle) – and many dramas unfold about the supporting characters. If you have read Shakespearean dramas, these again would not interest you. One character actually reads out a totally unrelated story from a book of knighthood in his curiosity to discover what has veered Don Quixote from the reality so very much. Imagine. Another issue is that I read an old translation which was very difficult to read with its wherewithals and thereofs and thous and other artistic (aka artificial) words.

No more old times classics for me please. That is, till I can resist the temptation (to add another feather in my cap) or till sify delivers my order for Treasure Island.

The Pianist - Book Review

Now thats survival. Jako rakhe saayian mar sake na koi. Read it to believe it.

The Pianist is a memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman - a Jew musician belonging to Poland - spanning three years, 1942-45. Its a true survival story of a man who lost his everything to German anti-Semitism and World War II, very modestly written intriguing tale of what the people really went through in all those years. i would have discarded it as an exaggerated tell-tale had it been fiction - or even if the events werent confirmed by a German officer's (Wilm Hosenfeld - whose compassion saved Szpilman's life) contemporaneous diary entries.

In these three years of his extraordinary life, Szpilman contemplated suicide, changed hiding places, escaped German soldiers narrowly, starved and froze - all this and more, countless number of times - in other words, scraped death every now and then. He lost all his loved ones - his only worldly possessions that remained were a fountain pen and a watch. How he lived through this ordeal and kept himself sound and sane is a typical example of the amazing human survival instinct.

Mark Twain has rightly said, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isnt". No wonder the 2002 Hollywood film based on this book grabbed three Oscars - actor Adrien Brody, director Roman Polanski and screenplay writer Ronald Harwood. The film has recieved many other international awards as well.

A Beautiful Mind - Book review and afterthoughts

A beautiful mind is the biography of a genius mathematician and Nobelist John Nash - who was at his mathematical best till thirties, then became paranoid with schizophrenia, was hospitalized, suffered shock treatments, pseudo-recovered (forced rationality on himself), was hospitalized again and again, recovered fully with passage of time, and was awarded the Nobel at the age of 58 for his work on game theory that he had done in his late-twenties - and now continues to work in the field of mathematics. Meanwhile, he also had a child, married (at 29), had another child, divorced, and re-married (with the same woman at the age of 60).

What a life. And what a mind. Really beautiful. All geniuses are somewhat insane, but this one beat insanity with a concious effort - and - without medication. (he gave up all psychotic treatment at 42). He himself, with the power of his will alone, very carefully avoided delirius thoughts from coming to his mind. To exert such a control over one's own brain must have required tremendous strength and will power. Hats off. Hats off for his wife as well. Alicia had such great belief in this man's genius, that even after getting divorced, she remained with him.

So the question that obviously comes to our un-genius-not-so-beautiful-minds is that is it really possible to control mental illness with the mind itself while it itself is sick? i think we are in an infinite loop here - control your own mind with your own mind by programming your own mind to function properly using your own mind - when it is going out of control. Guess i'll now stop writing in case my own mind goes out of its premises...

Gone with the wind by Margaret Mitchell

This is the story of Scarlett O'Hara - a nihilist lady (lady?) made tough by circumstances. This is the first anti-heroine novel that I have read (that is, the protagonist herself has majorly negative shades in her character). So at the end of this verrry looong but interesting story, when Scarlett does not get her true love, one doesnt feel sorry for her(in fact I felt she deserved it).

The plot is extremely interesting with its setting in the southern part of America during the American Civil War. One gets to know what all the people went through during this time through Mitchell's eyes. However, at some places the author seems to be biased towards white people. The story revolves around Scarlett and the people in her life and how she fights all odds in order to keep her family going during the war. But her motive is completely different. She is doing all this for the sake of a person she thinks she loves...but till the time she discovers true love..its too late!

All the major characters in the book have been sketched out very finely, and the reader is filled with respect for Melanie and love for Rhett. Scarlett's thought process has been described in minute details and many a times one feels ones own mind speaking through her views. All in all Gone with the wind is a complete entertainer which also educates; and compels us to have an insight into ourselves...must read for book lovers!