Freedom at Midnight

Fülszöveg

Freedom at Midnight
Press Comments
"In this song of India, authors Collins and Lapierre again display their celebrated flair for the epic."
Time Magazine
"There is no single passage in this profoundly researched book that one could factually fault. It is a work of scholarship, of investigation, research and of significance."
The New York Sunday Times
"The book is irreplacable not only because it evokes an essential episode in the history of the twentieth century but also because it provides the elements of a vital dossier : that of the first phase of a revolution capable of modifying in a decisive manner the balance of the forces in the world."
Le Monde
" .One reads their long tale with passionate interest in a single sweep. The portrait of their characters are so penetrating, so true that we seem to see and hear tihe elegant Nehru. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, or the inflexible and mysterious apostle of Pakistan, Jinnah."
Le Quotidiered, Paris... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Freedom at Midnight
Press Comments
"In this song of India, authors Collins and Lapierre again display their celebrated flair for the epic."
Time Magazine
"There is no single passage in this profoundly researched book that one could factually fault. It is a work of scholarship, of investigation, research and of significance."
The New York Sunday Times
"The book is irreplacable not only because it evokes an essential episode in the history of the twentieth century but also because it provides the elements of a vital dossier : that of the first phase of a revolution capable of modifying in a decisive manner the balance of the forces in the world."
Le Monde
" .One reads their long tale with passionate interest in a single sweep. The portrait of their characters are so penetrating, so true that we seem to see and hear tihe elegant Nehru. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, or the inflexible and mysterious apostle of Pakistan, Jinnah."
Le Quotidiered, Paris
"Everything is there, well set in its plac& and well said, all set around the Calvary of Gandhi, contradicted, adored, hated, rejected^ cherished, imposing on all his charisma, even on his worst enemies, on those who finally got him
on 30th January 1948 because he had managed to slow and then halt the gigantic massacre."
Le Point
LONDON, NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1947: A black Austin slips to 10 Downing Street through a capital scarred by war and fettered by austerity. There, its occupant, Louis Mountbatten, was asked to undertake a difficult assignment to become India's last Viceroy. His charge: to begin the dismemberment of an empire—the fabled Indian Raj.
ALLAHABAD, 13 FEBRUARY, 1948: A man leans from a small craft at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna Rivers to pour the contents of a silver urn upon the passing current. Thus blended with the waters that had carried away the ashes of so many of the faceless millions whose joys and sufferings he'd made his own, the ashes of India's murdered liberator, Mahatma Gandhi, begin their journey to the sea.
Between those two dates, the world had changed. Two great nations containing 400 million people, a fifth of all mankind, had been born. Ten million people had been uprooted, perhaps a quarter of a million killed, in the greatest migration in human history. And the Age of Imperialism had ended. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre tell the story of that epic period with the same combination of scrupulous research and vivid reporting as made so triumphant a success of O Jerusalem! and Is Paris Burning? Hundreds of
(Continued on next flap)
interviews, including over thirty hours of tape-recorded conversation with India's last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, thousands of pages of archive material, much of it never before made public, three years of work and countless miles of travel underlie Freedom at Midnight. Theirs is an India of emaciated sadhus and prosperous cotton brokers, maharajas and beggars, of the Khyber Pass and the funeral pyres of Benares, the foetid slums of Calcutta and the mansions of Bombay's Malabar Hill. It is the India of Jawaharlal Nehru, heart-broken by the tragedy of his country's division; of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Moslem who drank, ate pork, and rarely entered a mosque, yet led forty-five million Moslems to nationhood, proclaiming "We shall have India divided or India destroyed"; of Louis Mountbatten, beseeched by the leaders of an Independent India to take back the powers he had just passed to their hands; of Gandhi the "half naked fakir" who stirred a subcontinent without raising his voice and humbled Britain by refusing nourishment; of his killers, describing here for the first time, in all its chilling detail, their awful deed.
Exciting and readable, important and impressive, Freedom at Midnight is worthy in every way of the great subject it describes. Vissza