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 enlarge | Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $8.49
You Save: $7.51 (47%)
New (45) Used (19) from $4.92
Rating:  44 reviews
Sales Rank: 23580
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0142001007
Dewey Decimal Number: 954.56052
EAN: 9780142001004
ASIN: 0142001007
Publication Date: March 25, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: *BRAND NEW* 2004 Edition! Ships Same Day or Next!
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Legacy of Partition September 10, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi William Dalrymple HarperCollins 1993
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi was my travel reading for my first trip to India in the summer of 2007, a trip which began and ended in Delhi. Having read other writers and other Dalrymple books on India before I set out, I read City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi first on my outward journey, and then reviewed it again as we made our way back to Delhi on the last stage of our tour. The book was an invaluable resource, supplementing the ill-informed and poorly spoken guides who were difficult to understand and unable to answer questions in any depth. Dalrymple's book helped me to tie the city and its sites and history together into some sort of coherent whole. I also found the pen-and-ink illustrations by Dalrymple's wife Olivia Fraser very illuminating. Although at first sight they struck me as much too calm and uncluttered to convey the true image of the places they posed, I later came to appreciate how they captured the inherent essence of their subject and spoke volumes in their simple way.
As a journalist, Dalrymple has a knack for finding the right people to talk with - people with living memories of the time he writes about, who can bring to life the crumbling ruins they inhabit and instil us with visions of the beauty that once radiated in Delhi. It is certainly difficult to see today but reading the stories did help me to understand the sensibilities of some of the Delhi-wallahs we encountered in our travels.
My one criticism of the book is that he reuses material that has appeared elsewhere, which broke the rhythm of my involvement with his story and made me feel uncomfortable. These passages were extensive, and not changed sufficiently to feel new in any way. I was surprised that his editors allowed this to pass, unless there were deadline difficulties.
The overall impression that I was left with is that India today is still suffering from the reverberations of the devastation of partition, which brought incomprehensible tragedy and hardship and touched almost every family in India in one way or another. As we watch India vie for its place in the globalised technological marketplace, we will understand her better if we remember this recent back-story in her development.
 learn more scintillating facts about Delhi August 10, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Dalrymple knows tons about the history of Delhi. The book is poignant but not a comedy as advertised. He weaves past and present by ambitiously visiting historic sites to wean the truth out of them while detailing present family life with an Indian landlady. There are also some sweet water color illustrations.
 Incomplete August 3, 2007
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
I didn't finish this book. I usually love this kind of book. I got tired of all the Indian Jargon. Yes, it has a glossary, but many of the words weren't even there. There were references to things never explained. It was like I came in on a movie in the middle. The narrative was just not enough to keep going.
Beautiful and Terribly Flawed July 4, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book re-awakened by desire to return to India, and experience once again the madness, and beauty that is India. He made me realise that I had viewed Delhi superficially in the past, only scratching the surface, and never plunging into the dark depths of what lay beneath the rapidly growing megalopolis. I would recommend the book to anybody visiting India or its capital.
However, the author himself only superficially touched on Delhi as well. The title itself indicates he was focussing on Mughal Delhi, and was not particularly interested in much more. It shows in that it is suprising that a book could be written about a city which has had a Hindu prescence for millenia and barely touch on them. It would be as in one wrote a history of Montreal, and concentrated on the Anglophones, never touching on the fact that the city was founded by the French, and was at best a small anglo enclave in a French sea. The Hindu roots of the city, rooted as they are in the epic war of the Mahabharata, are relegated to a passing comment of a rumble between a couple of tribes of cave men. His comments about the lack of Hindu monuments in the city are astounding naive, given that many of the great Muslim, and even Moghul monuments were constructed from the debris of temples destroyed by the intolerant conquerors of Delhi in the middle ages. His treatment of Punjabis, which alternated between shrewd business people to village bumpkins fed into stereotypes, except when he touched on the horrific massacres following the death of Indira Ghandi.
Kudos to Dalrymple for a great work, but too bad for his overly narrow vision. While the great Moghul and Islamic architecture astounds, the spirit of Delhi has alway been Hindu, in that it seemingly continously undergoes the cycle of death and rebirth. The author never understood that.
Learned a lot about a city where I grew up June 12, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I learned a lot about a city I thought I knew all about. This is the fifth book I read by the author, and I can't wait for him to come out with new projects.
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