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

Reading this book reminds me of how incomplete historical knowledge is. This was a massive undertaking at the time (colonial India) and was just about lost to history until Roy Moxham undertook his exhaustive investigation. He writes a fascinating tale--should I say of obsession or megalomania on the one side, persistence and ingenuity on the other?

I must have read this before Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps this is a bit of cautionary tale about the ultimate futility of civil engineering? show more Another point that resonates is the egomania of Albert Speer who designed architecture not for its use but for how well the structures would stand the ravages of time in the bright future of the 1000-year reich.... show less