BOOKLESS IN BAGHDAD: On Writing and Writers by SHASHI THAR00R Arcade; $25 (1-55970-757-7) Pages: 288

Tharoor, multitalented and multifaceted, is an Under-Secretary at the UN, a journalist, a biographer of Nehru, a celebrated novelist with a bent for satire, and a polished and pointed essayist. He begins this far-ranging, piquant, and enlivening collection of essays about reading and writing with a charming piece about his boyhood addiction to books, primarily British in origin, a reminiscence that segues into the first of many illuminating cross-cultural inquiries into how the imagination trumps prejudice. Turning to the Indian tradition, he considers the power of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, and how it inspired him to write his controversial Great Indian Novel (1991). Tharoor then ruminates insightfully on the works of Pushkin, Neruda, Narayan, le Carré, and Rushdie; globalism and culture; and the state of literature (precarious) and illiteracy (rampant) in America. His diplomatic work meshes with his literary passion throughout, but it is especially tangible in his sensitive account of a visit to Baghdad¹s book row in 1998, where he witnesses the power of books under even the most trying circumstances