San Antonio College Library

The great Indian wedding is the "great Indian obsession," on par with the other two things that possess the country's imagination: cricket and film. The Great Indian Marriage Bazaar is the film that India stars in, written and directed by the participants and produced to the best of their abilities. In an era of modernization in India, arranged marriages have become a multi-billion-dollar business. Forty percent of the world's marriages take place...

In this wide-ranging exploration of the Renaissance, Jerry Brotton shows the period as a time of unprecedented intellectual excitement, cultural experimentation, and interaction on a global scale, alongside a darker side of religion, intolerance, slavery, and massive inequality of wealth and status.-publisher description.

Located at the crossroads of various trade routes since the 2nd millenium B.C., Aleppo was ruled successively by the Hittites, Assyrians, Arabs, Mongols, Mamelukes and Ottomans. Its 13th-century citadel, its 12th-century Great Mosque and various 17th-century madrasas, palaces, caravanserais and hammams give it a cohesive and unique urban fabric, now threatened by overpopulation.

"I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it," confesses the author. Take the train with him through Europe and Asia.

In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India...