Roy Moxham

This book is described as a biography of Phoolan Devi, a low-caste woman born in a rural community in India. She is married off at the age of 11 and suffered years of abuse by her much older husband. After being returned in disgrace to her family, she is kidnapped and raped by bandits. Phoolan is a survivor. She joined the bandits, taking money from the rich and sharing it with the poor. After years in jail, she becomes a Member of Parliament, always fighting for the poor and for women's show more rights.

Roy Moxham is fascinated with India and writes to Phoolan while she is in jail. Upon her release, he visits her and her family several times. I was never clear what his motivations were, and wish the book had been more about Phoolan's life instead of her times with him, helping him buy a house in India etc.

I couldn't warm up to the writer who opens the book by saying he was "ashamed" that people thought he was interested in a romantic or sexual relationship with Phoolan because she's "homely". I suspect he overplayed his importance to her and his role in things.

Also, the book contains a list of illustrations, but no actual illustrations. More frustration! show less

This is not only entertaining, but more informative than the other brief histories out there. The author traces the history of tea largely through economics and politics, but uses enough examples and anecdotes to keep it interesting. I was surprised that there wasn't more about tea growing in Africa, as the author was a tea estate manager in Malawi at one time, but I would recommend this book.

I do not drink tea; I don't like the taste of it and never have. Nevertheless, I found A Brief History of Tea: The Extraordinary Story of the World's Favourite Drink, by Roy Moxham, to be a vastly entertaining and informative book. In it, Moxham traces the origins of tea from ancient China through to modern India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and various nations of Africa. Moxham himself ran a tea plantation in the early 1960s, in what was then called Nyasaland and is now known as Malawi, and he show more begins and ends his book with some personal reminiscences of that period of his life. The story is, of course, full of imperialism, appalling working and living conditions, near-slavery and revolutions; there is also perhaps more than I, a non-believer, needed to know about the production of different types of tea and how advances in agricultural technology helped to increase yield exponentially. On the other hand, I now know why my mother prefers Typhoo Tea over all others - she is an Englishwoman and lived much of her early life around Birmingham, the home of that British company. Good to know! show less

An amazing story of what must be one of the longest artificial constructions the world has ever seen (after the Great Wall of China). In the Nineteenth Century the British rulers of India decided to create a giant thorny hedge down the length of India to ensure the tax on salt was enforced. You have to give it to the British; whether it be frankly ludicrously long hedges cutting a whole nation in half or the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines, they don't do things by half.

Of course, the show more most amazing thing about the hedge is that the world had completely forgotten about it until the author found a lone reference to the hedge in an old rare book. Moxham may not be a professional writer but he is a good detective, tracking down other references to the hedge and illustrating the role the integral role the Great Hedge played in Indian life, complete with a cameo of Mahatma Gandhi.

I doubt this will be a spoiler because obviously he finds a remnant of the hedge by the conclusion. show less