BOOK WATCH

Vintage Puzo

Six Graves To Munich is a story with a predictable ending. Yet, so clinical is the narrative — shorn of all emotion except a barely-in-check anger that is always simmering but seldom boils over — that the pages keep turning as the reader is sucked into protagonist Michael Rogan’s killing spree to avenge his wife’s murder and his own torture by the Gestapo in the twilight days of World War II.

Written with the usual twists and turns, Six Graves To Munich is a “long-lost novel” from Mario Puzo. Published a year before he completed The Godfather, this book went unnoticed because it was written under the pseudonym Mario Cleri; the name he used while writing WWII adventure features for the magazine True Action.

Though Puzo has always maintained that he was never connected to the mafia and The Godfather was a pure work of fiction, there was nothing fictional about his pseudonym. It was short for Clericuzio, the name of his mother’s first husband that was borne by his step-siblings which struck as a “marvelous name” to Puzo in his childhood.

Published in 1967 by Banner, this novel rarely finds mention among Puzo’s works. In fact, whatever mention there is of Six Graves to Munich is courtesy Quercus which recently acquired the rights of the novel and has just brought it out as a Puzo venture with Mario Cleri relegated to fine print.

Obama-speak

U.S. President Barack Obama’s campaign style was sought to be replicated by many an Indian Net-savvy politician in the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections. Probably a more useful aspect of his campaign to emulate would have been his content-rich speeches.

Even after the euphoria of an African-American occupying the most powerful office in the world has died down, the speeches still hold an appeal. Yes, there is rhetoric like the very pithy slogan “Yes We Can”, but his speeches reflect on a range of issues that plague the U.S. and — as a consequence of its far-reaching influence — the rest of the world.

Jaico has brought to India a collection of 30 speeches that show Obama differ with the U.S. policy on Iraq in 2002, seek to usher in a politics of hope in ‘04, constantly remind people about the values that made America the land of the possible… A recurrent theme — evidently a nagging concern for the man — is the way India and China were marching ahead and how this could bring bad tidings for Americans if they did not pull up their socks.

Particularly interesting is his speech to The American Library Association where he makes out a case for allowing libraries to be a place to read without the fear of Big Brother watching. Eager to get children to read, he even goes on to suggest that McDonald’s could pack a book into its “Happy Meal” instead of a toy.

A-Z of Indian Constitution

Appalled by what he describes as “high level of constitutional illiteracy” among Indians, former Lok Sabha Secretary General Subhash C. Kashyap has taken upon himself the task of making the Indian Constitution accessible to the ordinary c itizen through a capsule-format ready-reckoner.

Presented in alphabetic order, Kashyap cuts through the legalese that makes reading the Constitution a rather daunting task. Given the sweep of the Constitution — it is the longest ever instrument of nation building adopted by any country — this “citizen’s primer” is by no means exhaustive but adequate enough to address the “constitutional illiteracy”.

Updated to include amendments and judicial pronouncements till mid-2008, Kashyap also seeks to explain why the founding fathers of India opted for Parliamentary democracy and some of the other salient features of the Constitution.

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