What We Are Reading Today: ‘Birds of India’

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Updated 19 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Birds of India’

  • Comprehensive and definitive, this is an indispensable guide for anyone birding in this part of the world

Authors: RICHARD GRIMMETT, CAROL INSKIPP, AND TIM INSKIPP 

The best field guide to the birds of the Indian subcontinent is now even better.

Thoroughly updated and substantially expanded, this third edition of “Birds of India” features revised color plates, text, and distribution maps, and 64 more pages than the previous edition.

Comprehensive and definitive, this is an indispensable guide for anyone birding in this part of the world.

 

 


What We Are Reading Today: A Defence of Pretence by Indira Ghose

Updated 13 December 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: A Defence of Pretence by Indira Ghose

Is civility merely a matter of reinforcing status and exclud-ing others? Or is it a lubricant in a polarized world, enabling us to overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good? 
In “A Defence of Pretence,” Indira Ghose argues that it is both. 
Ghose turns to the drama of Shakespeare’s time to explore the notion of civility. The theater, she suggests, was a laboratory where many of the era’s conflicts played out. 
The plays test the precepts found in treatises on civility and show that, in the complexity and confusion of human life, moral purity is an illusion.