Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Baker

NMH welcomes

Amitav Ghosh

October 18, 2009 at 6:30 pm

Raymond Hall
Rhodes Art Center

and

Deborah Baker

Speaking to classes on
October 19, 2009

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State of the World Speaker Series

This special State of the World lecture marks a significant gift to Northfield Mount Hermon by Charles Wantman, in honor of his family. Amitav Ghosh's lecture is the inaugural address in the Wantman Family State of the World Speaker Series. Mr. Wantman's gift underwrites the State of the World speaker series and in doing so, enhances the intellectual experience of each NMH community member.

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Who are Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Baker?

Read about acclaimed authors, Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Baker, through their writing and interviews. (Available only on the NMH network)

"The march of the novel through history: The testimony of my grandfather's bookcase."
"As a child I spent my holidays in my grandfather's house in Calcutta, and it was there that I began to read. My grandfather's house was a chaotic and noisy place, populated by a large number of uncles, aunts, cousins, and dependents, some of them bizarre, some merely eccentric, but almost all excitable in the extreme. Yet I learned much more about reading in this house than I ever did in school."
- From the Kenyon Review
"Om Sweet Om"
"Baker’s work is a piece of devoted scholarship and legwork dunked in the screwy, hyper-intelligent, tragicomic essence of everything that drove Ginsberg to take a trip that not only changed his life but helped spawn several generations of hipsters, hippies, writers, artists, rock stars, mental cases and self-annointed medicine men."
- The New York Times Review of Ms. Baker's book, A BLUE HAND: THE BEATS IN INDIA
"An Interview with Amitav Ghosh."
Ghosh's novels blur boundaries between genres -- fiction and archival fieldwork -- to complicate postcolonial identity. To this end, he also sidesteps inventing postcolonial characters cut from a victim-cookie-cutter mold, exploring the complex shading between the good and bad; he breathes life even into figures whom other writers might discard as abominable.
-From WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
"Addicted to Empire."
"That moment in history, the early 19th century in India, was a moment when everyone was reinventing themselves in new ways," muses Ghosh. "It was true of English people who were in India, it was true of Americans, it was true of Indians. There was this huge upheaval, people being torn away from their homes."
- From BOOKSELLER

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