O Shakespeare! My Shakespeare!

Just as Karl Marx's political philosophy has been adapted by diverse nations across the world, and Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice has been translated into innumerable languages (including Oriya, a language spoken in the East Coast of India), so there is hardly a language into which Shakespeare's plays hasn't been wrought.

Shakespeare has been embraced by Americans, not simply because America was a British colony once upon a time, but also because the plays of Shakespeare lends themselves to adaptation as there is an unsurpassable universality in their kernel. A Shakespearean contemporary had said that Shakespeare is "nature itself."

James Shapiro has edited an anthology of essays on Shakespeare by famous Americans from all fields, including politics and sports, and Shakespeare in America is said to be a terrific read.

I was struck by Bill Clinton's name as the provider of the volume's foreword. Maybe he consorted with the Merry Wives of Windsor!

Casualties of globalization

Dave Eggers has taken upon himself the task of chronicling the changing landscape of an emergent America in the global economy. In A Hologram for the King, we read about the erosion of the culture of manufacturing in this nation; a particular victim is Alan Clay, who has been edged out of the manufacturing competition and cornered into the slot, Eggers disdainfully refers to as "consulting". Consulting, in the eyes of Clay's father, a retired worker for a national railroad company, is a pansy occupation which has emasculated the American labor ethos.

Eggers pitches Clay as a representative American worker, shaped by traditional American middle-class ethos. However, he is still a fictionalized version of the American middle-class man whose entire way of life has been affected by economic globalization.

In Factory Man, veteran journalist Beth Macy, gets the saga of the aforementioned demographic straight from the horse's mouth. The book is a work of non-fiction with the same kind of sublimity achieved by the best works of fiction as Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Aman Sethi's A Free Man, among others.

For me, it's a must read, as I take a keen interest in work that records the histories of the lives of ordinary, sometimes poor, citizens of the globe who contribute toward the globe's changes yet remain invisible and unacknowledged.

The reign of Capital

Yet another book on "Capital"?

Novelist Rana Dasgupta's new work of nonfiction has a punny title, playing on the political and financial significance of the word capital, for the book is both on money and on the presence of new wealth in New Delhi, the capital city of India.

According to the New Yorker Magazine:

In the interviews with rich young Indians that make up much of the unsparing portrait of moneyed Delhi, no telling detail seems to escape Dasgupta's notice. His novelistic talents are matched by his skill at eliciting astonishing candor from his subjects. The best passages are incisive summaries of the human and environmental costs of the elite's wealth and privilege and his persuasive predictions of crises yet to come. Dasgupta constantly seeks to upend conventional wisdom about Delhi, the murky circulation of its money, and the roots of its periodic outbursts of violence, making this one of the most worthwhile in a strong field of recent books about India's free-market revolution and its unintended dire consequences.