New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp xx + 295, ₹
895.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp xxiv + 577, price not indicated.
Asia’s Journey to Prosperity: Policy, Market, and Technology Over 50 Years by Asian Development Bank,
Manila: ADB, 2020 (ebook), http://dx.doi.org/10.22617/TCS190290.
The transformation of Asia from its status as the most impoverished region to the growth locomotive of the world economy within five decades is unprecedented and nothing short of a miracle. The achievement seems all the more profound when juxtaposed with a very pessimistic outlook of Asia’s development prospects made by Gunnar Myrdal in his three-volume tome
Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968.
A country scene from Hampshire, England. (Image: Scott Evans/Unsplash.com)
Middle-earth is almost as vivid a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work as any sentient being who walks upon it. Its finely detailed vistas read like descriptions of actual places. The believability of the setting invites belief in the stories that unfold there. For both readers and characters, “landscape become a way to chart interior as well as exterior journeys.”
How did Tolkien “subcreate” so compelling a Secondary Universe? He wrote what he knew. What Tolkien knew and how he knew it is the basis of John Garth’s lavishly illustrated book
Why the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is important in Islamic history
Why the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is important in Islamic history
The conjunction was believed to mark the arrival of a divinely guided universal ruler
On December 21, 2020, the day of the winter solstice, the world will witness a planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Though a conjunction of these two planets happens every twenty years or so, rarely do both of them come quite so close to each other or are so clearly visible in the sky. In fact, the last time these two planets appeared in such close proximity was on July 16, 1623; and the last time such a conjunction occurred at night (when it could actually be observed by the naked eye) was March 4, 1226.
Author: Simon Levis Sullam
In this brief gripping revisionist history of Italy’s role in the Holocaust, Simon Levis Sullam presents an unforgettable account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy’s Jews between 1943 and 1945.
While most historians have long described Italians as relatively protective of Jews during this time, The Italian Executioners tells a very different story, recounting in vivid detail the shocking events of a period during which Italians set in motion almost half the arrests that sent their Jewish compatriots to Auschwitz, says a review on the Princeton University Press website.
With a historian’s rigor and a novelist’s gift for scene-setting, Levis Sullam dismantles the seductive myth of the “good Italians” who sheltered Jews from harm. In collaboration with the Nazis, and with different degrees of involvement, the Italians were guilty of genocide.
Apocalyptic prophecies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Europe often involved Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions, says historian Laura Ackerman Smoller.
Astronomers and amateur star gazers alike are training their telescopes on the evening sky for a heavenly spectacle when the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is more visible from Earth than it’s been in nearly 800 years.
The celestial event will play out on Monday this year’s winter solstice when our solar system’s two largest planets appear side by side above the horizon soon after sunset.
It’s been nearly eight centuries since the pair of planets appeared in conjunction this close to Earth. In 1623, a similar conjunction of the planets occurred, but on the same side of the sky as the sun, which meant it wasn’t visible from the Blue Planet. Monday’s conjunction will be the first visible occurrence since before the time of Marco Polo.