Tag Archive for: Amitav Ghosh

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Wild Fictions | Amitav Ghosh

 

Amitav Ghosh’s superb essay collection maps the turbulent waters in which human survival, climate breakdown and colonial history converge, and the migrant’s smartphone becomes the talisman of a “global citizenry of desire.”

“Climate change and migration are in fact two cognate aspects of the same thing,” he writes: the outcome of a frenzy of production and consumption in an age of disaster capitalism, imperial violence, and the delusion of “neutral” progress.

Wild Fictions is a timely atlas of entangled destinies, highlighting the increasingly endangered symbiosis of the human, the more-than-human, and the planet we call home.

 

The Hungry Tide | Amitav Ghosh

 

Off the easternmost corner of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans, where settlers live in fear of drowning tides and man-eating tigers. Piya Roy, a young American marine biologist of Indian descent, arrives in this lush, treacherous landscape in search of a rare species of river dolphin and enlists the aid of a local fisherman and a translator. Together the three of them launch into the elaborate backwaters, drawn unawares into the powerful political undercurrents of this isolated corner of the world that exact a personal toll as fierce as the tides.

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THE GREAT DERANGEMENT | AMITAV GHOSH

 

In this searing indictment — that’s also an empowering call to action — award-winning novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh analyzes modern culture, history and politics to show how popular narratives have failed to wrestle with the reality of our collective climate crisis. The breadth of research is astounding but so too is Ghosh’s ability to diagnose the grave inadequacies of modern culture and offer some pathways forward. A book I return to again and again, The Great Derangement is haunting and harrowing, as Ghosh tells us some hard truths. But it’s also an inspiring challenge to writers, urging us to find new ways to tell the most important story on earth. — Melissa Jean Gismondi

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis | Amitav Ghosh

‘Something between a history book and a fable about consumerism, The Nutmeg’s Curse tells the story of how rapacious greed for spices led the Dutch East India Company to seize control of Indonesia’s Banda Islands – then the world’s only source of nutmeg – in the 17th century. Ghosh prises apart this overlooked history to draw a series of troubling links between the spice trade, imperialism, capitalism, climate change and war. He is a brilliant storyteller, and this striking and disturbing book helps us understand how the modern world came to be.’ Nick Hunt, guest contributor to May 2022’s Rebel Library Recommends