Dancing In Cambodia & Other Essays

Through extraordinary first-hand accounts Amitav Ghosh presents a compelling chronicle of the turmoil of our times. `Dancing in Cambodia’ recreates the first-ever visit to Europe by a troupe of Cambodian dancers with King Sisowath in 1906. Ghosh links this historic visit celebrated by Rodin in a series of sketches to the more recent history of the Khmer Rouge revolution. ‘The Town by the Sea’ records his experiences in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands just days after the tsunami and in ‘September 11’ he takes us back to that fateful day when he retrieved his young daughter from school in New York sick with the knowledge that she will be marked by the same kind of tumult that has defined his own life. About the Author Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh Sri Lanka Iran Egypt India and the United Kingdom where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction travel writing and journalism his books include The Circle of Reason The Shadow Lines In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous novel The Glass Palace was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. Recently published there The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad. Ghosh has won France's Prix Medici Etranger India's prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Pushcart Prize. He now divides his time between Harvard University where he is a visiting professor and his homes in India and Brooklyn New York.