Ebook: Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles

The elephant is like a rope, says the blind man. It is like a tree-trunk, says another. No, it is like a snake, says a third. Thus Ved Mehta assembles his idiosyncratic reports on the elephant's epidermis, while Judith Brown meticulously measures it inch by inch.

Appropriately, the elephant is Mohandas Gandhi, whose effects on his associates, his country, and the world are still being sized up while his image, like that of the Indian elephant, has become deified. Neither book purports to give a comprehensive account of Gandhi's life and thought. Some 400 biographies have already tried, and many are no doubt yet to come.