This new edition brings Stanley Wolpert's brilliantly succinct and accessible introduction to India completely up to date for a new generation of readers, travelers, and students. In crisp detail, Wolpert gives a panoramic overview of the continent on which the world's most fascinating ancient civilization gave birth to one of its most complex modern democratic nations. India now includes new sections on the country's current global economic development, the recent national elections, and on its international relations, including those with Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka, and the United States, India's new strategic global partner.
Stanley Wolpert is the author of fourteen books, including A New History of India, now in its eighth edition, and Gandhi's Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. He has taught the history of India and Pakistan at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1958.
Praise for previous editions:
“Wolpert understands India. . . . . Fluent, wide-ranging and often wise, this volume is a useful addition to a shelf of books on India.”—Washington Post Book World
“A superb distillation of a lifetime's learning by UCLA's great historian of India. Refreshingly concrete and detailed, [and] vibrantly written, Wolpert's overview repeatedly succeeds at explaining a culture that gave us little things like the decimal system, chess, cotton cloth, meditation, and two religions called Buddhism and Hinduism.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
“If one were to read a single book about India in a lifetime, this should be it.”—Library Journal
“To all of us who delightedly and sometimes repetitively call ourselves Old India hands, Stanley Wolpert is the acknowledged authority. This book tells why. Indian history, art, culture, and contemporary politics are here in accurate, wide-ranging, and lucid prose."—John Kenneth Galbraith
264 pp.6 x 9Illus: 29 b/w photographs, 1 map
9780520260320$34.95|£30.00Paper
Aug 2009