Mahatma Gandhi and India's Independence in World History

School Library Journal

Gr 7-10-This combination of biography and history of the Indian drive for independence suffers from chronological confusion. The story begins with Gandhi's leadership of the Salt March of 1930 and flashes back to the origins of English involvement with India, colonial Indian history, and Gandhi's early years. Malaspina continues the account of her subject's rise to leadership of the Indian National Congress, working for democratic reforms and swift independence. Not until chapter eight does the text return to the 1930s to pick up the chronology. Something Gandhi said about nonviolence in the 1930s is used to describe his reaction to the Amritsar Massacre in 1919. Gandhi is arrested and tried in 1922, serves 4 years in a cell, and is released in 1924. According to the text, Gandhi was invited to Delphi to meet "Winston Churchill, the British prime minister," in the early 1930s. But Churchill did not assume that position until 1940. A concluding chapter explains the importance of Gandhi's philosophy to the struggle for racial equality in South Africa as well as the United States, but how he came to espouse nonviolent civil disobedience and what that means is lost in the welter of historical detail. Period black-and-white photographs are helpful, but undated. Likewise, short quotations from Gandhi's writings, labeled "Source Documents," often lack date and placement in context. John B. Severance's Gandhi: Great Soul (Clarion, 1997) is a more reliable source.- Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.