Download Free The Pretender An Impostor Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Pretender An Impostor and write the review.

This illustrated and light-hearted volume tells the history of the tradition of pretence and rebellion through the remarkable stories of many individuals who have pictured themselves as kings, queens or presidents. Beginning with Greek and Roman pretenders, such as the Roman governor Posthumus who declared imself emperor in AD 260, the authors discuss the circumstances that have produced imposters and the means that they have used to cling to power or keep their hopes alive. More recent pretenders include usurper Henry IV, various Stuarts, a line that still produces `heirs' today, and numerous European claimants, including the famous case of Anna Anderson or Grand Duchess Anastasia.
In 1921 a traveling religious man appeared in eastern British Bengal. Soon residents began to identify this half-naked and ash-smeared sannyasi as none other than the Second Kumar of Bhawal--a man believed to have died twelve years earlier, at the age of twenty-six. So began one of the most extraordinary legal cases in Indian history. The case would rivet popular attention for several decades as it unwound in courts from Dhaka and Calcutta to London. This narrative history tells an incredible story replete with courtroom drama, sexual debauchery, family intrigue, and squandered wealth. With a novelist's eye for interesting detail, Partha Chatterjee sifts through evidence found in official archives, popular songs, and backstreet Bangladeshi bookshops. He evaluates the case of the man claiming, with the support of legions of tenants and relatives, to be the long-lost Kumar. And he considers the position of the sannyasi's detractors, including the colonial government and the Kumar's young widow, who resolutely refused to meet the man she denounced as an impostor. Along the way, Chatterjee introduces us to a fascinating range of human character, gleans insights into the nature of human identity, and examines the relation between scientific evidence, legal truth, and cultural practice. The story he tells unfolds alongside decades of Indian history. Its plot is shaped by changing gender and class relations and punctuated by critical historical events, including the onset of World War II, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Great Calcutta Killings. And by identifying the earliest erosion of colonialism and the growth of nationalist thinking within the organs of colonial power, Chatterjee also gives us a secret history of Indian nationalism.
This illustrated and light-hearted volume tells the history of the tradition of pretence and rebellion through the remarkable stories of many individuals who have pictured themselves as kings, queens or presidents. Beginning with Greek and Roman pretenders, such as the Roman governor Posthumus who declared imself emperor in AD 260, the authors discuss the circumstances that have produced imposters and the means that they have used to cling to power or keep their hopes alive. More recent pretenders include usurper Henry IV, various Stuarts, a line that still produces `heirs' today, and numerous European claimants, including the famous case of Anna Anderson or Grand Duchess Anastasia.
A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works—from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.