In a thirty-year career in journalism, Ghosh has written extraordinary firsthand accounts of catastrophic events in every part of the world. For the first time, Incendiary Circumstances brings together the finest of these pieces—many of them never published in the States—in a remarkable and compelling chronicle of the turmoil of our times. Moving in reverse chronological order, Incendiary Circumstances begins with Ghosh"s arrival in the Andaman and Nicobar islands just days after the tsunami hit. We then travel back to September 11, as Ghosh retrieves his daughter from school in New York, sick with the knowledge that his young child has already witnessed the kind of firestorm that has defined his own life. With a prescience born of experience (Ghosh was educated in India, the Middle East, and England), he wrote of the dangerous rise of Islamic fundamentalism well before 9/11. He has stood on an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan, interviewed Pol Pot"s sister-in-law in Cambodia, shared the elation of Egyptians when Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize. In every piece he writes
with unmatched intelligence and a deep sense of sympathy. Incendiary
Circumstances is irresistible reading, an unparalled testimony to three
decades defined by the ravages of politics and nature.