Reviews for Beyond Fragmentation Perspectives on Caribbean History

The average rating for Beyond Fragmentation Perspectives on Caribbean History based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-19 00:00:00 Mary Johnson An interesting but somewhat uneven history of Bollywood. The view is clearly personal as it starts with a lengthy prologue about the author accompanying Pamela Bordes to produce a photo feature on Bollywood (for a British magazine) and ends with excerpts from interviews of directors and actors. The book starts right from the beginning of Bollywood - the silent films, the visionary directors, the legends - and continues down the decades till 1970s in great detail and then jumps through the next two decades in one chapter and an afterword. Also, it focuses a lot on the 1970s, devoting a full chapter to the making of Sholay. This, in itself, shouldn't have been a problem - except the chapter is merely a summary of Anupama Chopra's excellent book on the film. Also, the detail kind of digresses depending on the material available to the author. For example, in the chapter on India's parallel cinema, we get a lengthy description of Shyam Benegal's Bose but many worthies of the movement are either left out or mentioned cursorily. I quite enjoyed the story till the 1960s as the writing is engaging and follows the Indian tradition of sub-stories emerging out of the main story. The writing holds you till the very end but several factual errors started popping up from the 1970s. (This made me wonder if errors were there in the earlier chapters also and I noticed them only in the period I know a bit about.) Overall, not a bad attempt but clearly written for the 'foreigner curious about India' market. That would have been fine but the author tries to make his characters identifiable reference points, providing some unintended hilarity. (E.g. Subhash Ghai is called Bollywood's Oliver Stone, Madhuri Dixit is our Meryl Streep and Dimple a cross between Barabara Streisand and Bette Midler! Oh, also Mother India is India's Citizen Kane.)

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-20 00:00:00 Robert White This could have been a very good book , if it was a bit more planned and edited well. The book would start off very well giving enough of a gist of Indian Cinema's evolution , but it goes down of It's previous pace as it advances . Somewhere down the middle of the book , you feel the author has left the main idea of the book and is talking about some other idea . But , having said all this , talking up a subject matter like 'History of Bollywood' and bundling it up in a book was a challenge. A pretty hard challenge as of that . I do feel , Mihir Bose does a good job on the whole , if not great .