Word: booked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...with a Messianic conviction that "the day go come when you go be proud to tell people that you did know Ganesh." Dazzled by the arcane wonders of the printed word, he embarks on a brief but disastrous career teaching in a district school, goes on to write a book: 101 Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion. ("Q. What is Hinduism? A. Hinduism is the religion of the Hindus. Q. Why am I a Hindu? A. Because my parents and grandparents were Hindus.") Eventually Ganesh stumbles on his true mission: a career as a masseur and mystical Hindu visionary...
Soon he is doing such a brisk business exorcising evil spirits that he has to buy his own fleet of taxis to ferry his patients over the rutted dirt roads. When Ganesh writes a book called What God Told Me ("On Thursday, May 12, at nine o'clock in the morning, just after I had had breakfast, I saw God . . ."), half the island of Trinidad burns with celestial visions. His Profitable Evacuation (approved by island authorities in the mistaken belief that it is a book on civil defense) becomes a bestseller. Ganesh tops his career by representing his country...
...This book is a reverent and amusing hymn to a handful of adventurers who penetrated the bone-littered wastes of Central Asia during the past 125 years. Many of them stayed there, with their heads cleaved from their bodies by the bloodthirsty rulers of Bokhara, Merv, Kokand and Khiva. The most fascinating of these adventurers was one Joseph Wolff, a disputatious Jew turned Anglican missionary, who set out in 1843 to rescue two British officers held captive in Bokhara...
...Date Town. Other valiant adventurers in the book include Hungarian-born Arminius Vambery, who disguised himself as a dervish in 1863 and traveled for ten months through Central Asia; American Januarius MacGahan, the special correspondent of the New York Herald, who dodged both Cossacks and Turkoman cavalry in his daring 1873 coverage of the Russian conquest of Khiva; Irishman Edmund O'Donovan, representing the London Daily News, who was simultaneously held prisoner and elected prince by the Tekke tribesmen of desolate Merv. Said O'Donovan: "It is well worth while to have lived among the Tekkes to know...
...associate editor of TIME), has an unerring eye for the Manhattan landscape, a faithful ear for the speech of the superficially smart. Although he never preaches, and the explicit statement of his theme never rises above the pitch of party talk, the reader is not allowed to forget the book's title; it would be a different story if any of the characters really had a notion...