Livia Manera Sambuy
Autore di In Search of Amrit Kaur: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World
Opere di Livia Manera Sambuy
Etichette
Informazioni generali
Non ci sono ancora dati nella Conoscenza comune per questo autore. Puoi aiutarci.
Utenti
Recensioni
Statistiche
- Opere
- 2
- Utenti
- 18
- Popolarità
- #630,789
- Voto
- 2.9
- Recensioni
- 3
- ISBN
- 5
- Lingue
- 1
This is basically what Livia Manera Sambuy knows about Amrit Kaur at the beginning of her book, and it's largely what she knows about her at the end. Hence, I suppose, the title: the fact that this is called In Search of Amrit Kaur should perhaps clue us in from the beginning that Sambuy was working with a fragmentary source base long after most people who personally knew Amrit had died, and that much of what she was going to find were dead ends. I sympathise with that predicament of the historian!
Yet this was a deeply frustrating read in that, at least based on what Sambuy tells us about her research process/methods here, she was unfocused and unsystematic in her work. I'm not at all satisfied, based on what we're presented with here, that there aren't more sources out there about Amrit that went unplumbed. The book as a whole is unfocused and badly structured, full of endless digressions about things which sometimes provide context for Amrit's life and times and sometimes don't—I'm sorry, but I don't really care about the history of the trade in precious gems, or the cricketing career of her grandson, or the details of the '70s burlesque career or education history of a Californian woman who by chance came into possession of some of Amrit's belongings. (Or at least, I might, but not when they're getting in the way of what I picked this book up for. Well, no, I'd never be interested in the cricket.)
I would have ploughed on through this and called it an uninspired but okay read, though, if not for what happened about 75% of the way through the book, when Sambuy reveals
Maybe one day Amrit Kaur will get a biography which doe her justice—but this book isn't it.… (altro)