Books read by Amulya Tuladhar, July 1 2013 to March 30, 2014

BOOKS READ AND REVIEWED BY AMULYA TULADHAR, NOV 1 2013 TO MAR 31, 2014:

Wildlife Murder by European Royals and Nobles between 1870-1921 AD:

TOTAL TIGERS KILLED = 90

This is 60% of the last official census of tigers in Nepal at 155!
These hi-fi European colonial murderers should pay for increasing our Tigers for at least extra 90 by aiding in all tiger conservation costs!!

Here are the details:
1870 Duke of Edinburgh kills 2 Tigers
1876 Prince of Wales later King Edward VII kills 23 Tigers
1894 Duke of Connaught kills 3 Tigers
1890 Prince Albert Victor or Duke of Clarence kills 6 Tigers
1911 King George V and party kills 39 Tigers
1921 Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII kills 17 Tigers
TOTAL KILLED = 90 TIGERS
For simplicity sake other wildlife kill details are left out.
Source: Diary of Field Marshall Kaiser Shumsher JBS Rana, in whose donated palace is the Kaisar Mahal or Ministry of Education and the Umar Khayaam poems in the Garden of Dreams housed in Thamel area, as quoted in the book:
"Notes on Hunting and Wild Life Conservation in Nepal" by Rishikesh Shaha, April 1970. Rishi Kesh Shah, a well read liberal diplomat, historian, and writer was Nepal's First Permanent Representative to UN; author of many books including "Nepal in Retrospect and Prospect" which I read and convener of political parties at Jawarhlal Nehru University New Delhi, during 1979 (Nepali 2036 saal kanda where King Birendra had to declare a referendum between Reformed Panchayat Democracy led by the King or Multiparty Democracy, led by Nepali Congress and other communist parties banned; among the participants were our last Prime Minister Babu Ram Bhattarai, his wife Hisila Yami and Nirmal Lama and Pradip Giri...
Historial tid bit,courtesy: Amulya Tuladhar

Suri ko katha book cover: english and nepali edition for free download, must read

"Highlights from THE COMPLETE NEW YORKER, 1925-2005" Just finished 123 pages of single page peeks into the highlights of my fav magazine of which i have got 4000 issues of 5 lakh pages in 8 DVDs as a gift, my dream gift. The highlights are conversation with Nobel Laureate Literateurs like Gabriel Garcia, Seamus Heaney, other Pulitzer and Booker Prize and other fine writers such as Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, James Thurber, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz: fine writing and fine sensibility from music, arts, life; really great pieces, better than being mad with daily shenanigans of nepali life, he he he. ART

"Thomas Gray, Philosopher Cat" by Philip J Davis, 1988, about whimsical mathematical philosopher don, his journeys into antiquarian intellectual riddles, the serendipitous Cambridge Cat, whimsical drawings, and most attractive: 2-3 page nuggets of chapters. Quite Enjoyable. ART

"The Man Who Went Up In Smoke" by Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo, 1966. a Swedish co-authored suspense, very thorough investigation, a very boring novel, glad it is over. — feeling tired.

"Abundance, A Novel of Maria Antoinette" by Sena Jeter Naslund, 542 pages, 2006, of one of the most reviled Last Queen of France whose head was chopped off by the Guillotine as was her husband, Louise XVI, 9 months earlier, from the French Revolution of 1790s establishing a Republic after abolishing the Kings, ( we treated our Royalty kindlier!). Famous for allegedly and out-of-touch reaction to bread riots preceding the Revolution,"Your Majesty, the people are asking for Bread" Response: "Why, give them cakes!" She was born the daughter of Austrian Empress and married off at age 14 to the future king who was more interested in pastries and hunting than sex and consummation to produce the future king for 8 years, (unbelievable, but true), resulting in rapid loss of popularity for not caring for France's desire for the future king etc etc. Nice Read.http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100967.Abundance

 — feelingamused.

Just read a fascinating book, "Daughters of the House" picked up for reading because of the curious name of the author 'Indrani Aikath Gyaltsen'; the last being a Tibetan, with the blurb saying she died in 1994, 3 yrs after writing this novel, and widely acclaimed by noted authors like Amy Tan. The plot of 3 women in a house all loving each other and the house and being disrupted by a man who enters the house to marry the elder auntie and the tales of conflict, betrayal, incest, with superb English and ending in a Scarlett O Hara "Gone with the Wind" climax of picking up the soil as exclaiming "For tomorrow is another day" after being through love betrayals and a civil war in the back. When I did a little search of Indrani, her life story was even more interesting: a privileged daughter of coal mine owner who managed to get Ivy League education at Barnard College, Columbia University, who came back with so much snot that she rejected a Punjabi Army Officer for his desi accent, although she was not very beautiful but still full of herself, quarrelled with her mother and elder sister after her father's estate and then consumed rat poision to die slowly with the mother and sister letting her die, as her husband alleged, for they did not talk to each other while living in the same house and litigating one another, Now THAT IS A STORY. She was accused of plagiarizing a book word for word and caught: Typical of super privileged English tattlers we have in Nepal who have no idea, content, or wisdom or roots and borrow from West and pass them as their own, contemptuously challenging to be caught and worse be punished when caught, Hubris on a Himal scale! ART

http://www.sawnet.org/news/aikath_gyaltsen.html

"God, Graves,and Grandmother" a Novel by Namita Gokhale. Absolutely delightful and unstoppable reading, i m going to read all her books i can find, i recommend you too .ART

A book every forester and environmentalist of Nepal, PRETENDS, to have read and quoted in their References Cited, I read for the second time, scrupulously and enjoyed it very much. Written by an auto-didact botanist based on numerous field visits beginning in 1950s, the wine merchant John David Adam Stainton, would make many a Phd trained biologists red in the face with rich, nuanced and accurate field observation. This books sorely needs updating and upgradation into an widely accessible digital and web format such as Arc WEB GIS (Geographic Information System) and or GOOGLE Earth, where accurate quantitatively precise locational and boundaries data of boundaries are georeferenced in Global Positioning System data instead of Stainton's 1500 ft or 10500 ft elevation on south slope or valley mouths level info so the work following Stainton, Dobremez, Jackson and Nepal Government Forest Department GIS maps can be most WIDELY INTERACTIVELY UPDATED AND ENRICHED not only by trained scientists but also motivated, dedicated debutantes and dilettantes like Stainton who died in 1988. Amulya Ratna Tuladhar

Forests of Nepal by Stainton, J. D. A.: John Murray, London 9780719526596 Hard Cover - Toby English

www.abebooks.com

Father of civil disobedience and Nature philosopher who dared to live a simple meaningful life and not pay taxes on his Walden Pond, full of nice quotes in readable format, one of those books one likes to come back to again and again like Kahlil Gibran's Rubaiyats... "We are older by faith than by experience". ART
http://www.amazon.com/Thoreau-Nature-PETER-PAUPER-PRESS/dp/B0016OO7CQ

Did Prithvi Narayan Shah, the king who created the boundaries of modern Nepal in 1768 AD eat POTATOES? Likely NOT. "Potato: how the humble spud rescued the Western World" is a history of the spread of potato from its origin in the Peruvian Andes, through the contact with Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, and struggling for social acceptance in Europe first through experimental royal gardens of the Spanish and the French and then to Ireland and England in the eighteenth century, so it is unlikely that Prithvi Narayan Shah or any Nepali tasted the Andean spud before the late nineteenth century. Fascinating!!

http://www.neebo.com/Textbook/the-potatob9780865475786/ISBN-9780865475786