Best Historical India & South Asia Biographies

The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard. Anyone who despairs of the individual’s power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way.

Mohandas K. Gandhi is one of the most inspiring figures of our time. Gandhi's nonviolent struggles in South Africa and India had already brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation, and controversy that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself. Although Gandhi presents his episodes chronologically, he happily leaves wide gaps, such as the entire satyagraha struggle in South Africa, for which he refers the reader to another of his books.

A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2017. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017. A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2017. " Ants Among Elephants is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new writer." A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up. A New York Times Editors' Choice “Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants , which records the life of a Dalit family in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and spans nearly a century, significantly enriches the new Dalit literature in English . Gidla’s book achieves the emotional power of V.S. In these pages, she has told those family stories and, in doing so, the story of how ancient prejudices persist in contemporary India, and how those prejudices are being challenged by the disenfranchised.” ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. "With her luminous command of fine details, Gidla manages a difficult and admirable task: she takes a tremendously personal memoir and renders it with such clarity that it tells the broader story of a place and an era." [but Gidla] brilliantly narrows the scope by explaining the tumultuous events of 20th-century India through her own family’s strife-ridden lives.” ―Priscilla Kipp, BookPage. Gidla is a smart and deeply sympathetic narrator who tells the lesser known history of India’s modern communist movement. “An astonishing account, fired by compassion and lit up with a fierce sense of justice, filled with unforgettable characters raging against the violence and oppression that lurks under the surface glitter of modern India.”. ―Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and the Damned “ Ants Among Elephants is a fascinating and moving portrayal of one family's struggle to live.” ―Lee E. Cart, Shelf Awareness. “In Ants Among Elephants, Sujatha Gidla gives us a family history that deeply humanizes key figures in India's Naxalite movement while also revealing an India that few outsiders will have encountered. Gidla's uncommon position and background equip her to approach her subject not with mere curiosity, or, worse yet, pity and condescension, but to tell the stories of some of India's most disenfranchised people from their own perspectives and in their own voices.

Drawn directly from 24 Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese sources, and retold by Thich Nhat Hanh in his inimitably beautiful style, this book traces the Buddha’s life slowly and gently over the course of 80 years, partly through the eyes of Svasti, the buffalo boy, and partly through the yes of the Buddha himself. The simple style is engaging, leading the reader through events in the Buddha's life while taking care to present and reinforce the central meaning and tone of his teaching.

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. The New Yorker Her family chronicle resembles a popular novel that stars strong, beautiful women and provides cameo roles for famous men....But Wild Swans is no romance.

The dramatic, pulse-pounding story of Harry Truman’s first four months in office, when this unlikely president had to take on Germany, Japan, Stalin, and the atomic bomb, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. although there are plenty of good biographies of Truman, few are as entertaining as Baime’s." Baime is a master storyteller, and The Accidental President contains everything a reader could ever want from a work of history: characters that jump off the page, tension that makes your pulse pound, and smooth, smart writing that makes you think. Baime's biography uses new sources to paint Harry Truman as a complex and thoroughly American figure. Baime has put a spotlight on those four months, recounting them faithfully and with heart, so that you come away with not only a sense of history, but a sense of the man, Harry Truman, as well. As Grandpa himself said a few years later, ‘It’s hell to be President of the Greatest Most Powerful Nation on Earth.’” —Clifton Truman Daniel, Truman’s grandson and author of Growing Up with My Grandfather: Memories of Harry Truman. “An entertaining new history of Truman’s first months in office...filled with events that are strikingly proportionate to what the Trump administration has weathered since January.” —John Batchelor, The Daily Beast. "By relying mostly on primary sources, Baime allows for a better perspective of Truman, in which his political decisions are equally as significant as the correspondence with his beloved wife, daughter, and mother. His carefully crafted narrative transports the reader back in time... Each sentence is carefully constructed and colorfully packed with details that makes Harry Truman and this period in history come alive.