Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust. I remember one beautiful and instructive little lyric that emanated from the physiology class. The most striking line of it was this: "The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man bod-y." What an inestimable boon it would have been if all the corporeal and spiritual facts pertaining to man had thus been tunefully and logically inculcated in our youthful minds! But what we gained in anatomy, music and philosophy was meagre.

Based on the life of the middle class intellectuals of Calcutta, it is an unforgettable story of a Bohemian brother and his two sisters caught in the cross-currents of changing social values. In many ways the story reflects a vivid picture of India's social transition - a phase in which the older elements are not altogether dead, and the emergent ones not fully evolved.

God's Terrible Voice in the City: wherein are set forth the sound of the voice, in a narration of the two dreadful judgments of plague and fire, inflicted upon the city of London. Thomas Vincent was a clergyman who had given a long and powerful sermon about the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. He, like many others at the time, believed the fire was a punishment from God for Londoners' sins. He lists 25 sins in detail, such as religious hypocrisy, lying, swearing, laziness, drunkenness, pride, gluttony, envy and lust. Coming so soon after the dreadful plague of 1665, which killed 100,000, the fire must have seemed a divine judgment. In God's Terrible Voice in the City, Vincent includes a dramatic account of the fire, which captures the atmosphere and terror of the event as well as some fascinating details.