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Title: The City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi by William Dalrymple, Tim Pigott-Smith ISBN: 0-00-105025-7 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Pub. Date: 18 March, 1996 Format: Audio Cassette

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Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (18 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Outstanding
Comment: A really wonderful book about the city of Delhi. Dalrymple and his wife go to spend a year living in Delhi (how did they afford this?), and he uses this arrangement as a way of chronicling the present day status of the city and delving deep into its history. He's done a very nice job of moving back and forth between present and past, managing to keep all his meetings and interviews with various experts quite interesting. The only part which lost my interest was an extended look into Sufi mysticism, but I just skimmed it and moved along. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in India, and especially to anyone planning a trip to Delhi.

Rating: 5
Summary: one of the best travelogues in a long time.
Comment: dalrymple is simply one of the best travelogue writers today as he lives, breathes, imbibes the culture & history of the places he travels to. in this book, he takes you to the delhi (india) of old, a once beautiful and cultured city and revisits the historical, political and cultural forces that shaped it. dalrymple does all this with a keen eye and a sympathetic ear for the inhabitants of the new delhi. he shows an unusual understanding for the people who once lived there and who live there now, their aspirations & fears. even more remarkable is the fact that, the empathy dalrymple feels comes through while he successfully avoids sounding patronizing in his depiction of old & new delhi. all in all a fabulous and very enjoyable travelogue, historical account and sympathetic tale from a man who truly belongs without having been born or raised there.....

Rating: 5
Summary: Capital
Comment: "City of Djinns" is an excellent account of a year spent in Delhi. William Dalrymple writes in a lively, often funny but always informative manner. The best travel writing manages to blend impressions of a country or place with descriptions of its people, as well as giving the reader a wider historical or social context. Dalrymple, being an historian, is skilled at the latter, yet he also has a keen eye for architecture and the oddities of the locals: he describes a variety of Dehli residents from International Backside Taxis and its drivers, his landlady, pigeon enthusiasts, hijras, through to partridge fights and more.

I thought that Dalrymple is particularly good at placing the British influence on India in context. Like much of Delhi's past, the British presence (or at least the physical signs of it) seems to have been erased. For that which remains, such as Lutyens's buildings, Dalrymple puts their impact into a new perspective.

"City of Djinns" is an affectionate book about Delhi and India, yet not an uncritical one. A lot is packed into 340 pages, and it's well worth the read.

G Rodgers