Incendiary Circumstances : A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

Incendiary Circumstances stands as a compelling chronicle of the turmoil of our times -- environmental, political, and cultural. In these seventeen absorbing pieces, Amitav Ghosh delivers extraordinary firsthand accounts of pivotal world events. He visits the Andaman and Nicobar Islands just days after the devastating 2005 tsunami, experiences the chaos in New York City on September 11, travels to an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan, interviews Pol Pot's sister-in-law in Cambodia, shares the elation of Egyptians when Naguib Mahfouz wins the Nobel Prize, and reports on the riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination. Taken together, Ghosh's essays offer a clear view of our turbulent world and serve as a powerful call to action.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction, travel writing, and journalism, his books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous novel, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. Recently published there, The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad. Ghosh has won France’s Prix Medici Etranger, India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York.