Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 15

Jhumpa Lahiri, born in London to Bengali parents and brought up in the United States, moved to Rome and began writing in Italian rather than in English.

Salim Ali, known as the Birdman of India, was the ornithologist whose surveys built the modern study of Indian birds, and The Book of Indian Birds is his best-known work, long used as a field guide.

Sunny Days was written by the opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar, whose nickname was Sunny, and it covers his early career including the record-breaking debut series in the West Indies.

Mind Master was written by the chess Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand with the writer Susan Ninan, and it sets out the lessons in concentration, preparation and handling defeat that Anand drew from his world championship matches.

The Aryabhatiya is a short Sanskrit work in verse, written by the astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata, which states an accurate approximation for pi, explains the daily rotation of the earth as the cause of the apparent motion of the stars, and gives the correct reason for eclipses.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, setting out the theory that species change over generations through natural selection, in which individuals better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring.

Straight from the Heart is the autobiography of the all-rounder Kapil Dev, who captained India to its first cricket World Cup title in 1983 at Lord's and who was the first bowler to take four hundred Test wickets.

The shooter Abhinav Bindra, who won the ten metre air rifle gold at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and became independent India's first individual Olympic gold medallist, wrote this book with the sports journalist Rohit Brijnath.

Unbreakable is the autobiography of the boxer M C Mary Kom of Manipur, a multiple world champion and an Olympic bronze medallist at London in 2012, and the book describes her journey from a farming family in Manipur to the world stage while raising a family.

The Race of My Life was written by the sprinter Milkha Singh, known as the Flying Sikh, together with his daughter Sonia Sanwalka, and it describes his childhood during Partition, his rise in Indian athletics and the fourth place in the 400 metres at the 1960 Rome Olympics that he…

The British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time in 1988 to explain the Big Bang, black holes and the nature of time to readers without a background in physics, and it became one of the best-selling science books ever published.

Wings of Fire was written by the aerospace scientist and eleventh President of India, A P J Abdul Kalam, along with Arun Tiwari, and it traces his life from a modest childhood at Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu to his work on the satellite launch vehicle and the missile programme.

Playing It My Way is the autobiography of the batsman Sachin Tendulkar, published in 2014 soon after he retired, and it was written with the sports writer Boria Majumdar.

Amartya Sen published this book in 1981 and showed, using the Bengal famine among other cases, that famines occur not merely because food is short in a country but because groups of people lose the ability to command food, which he called a failure of entitlement; the work was central…

The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published this long three-volume study of South and South East Asia in 1968, examining why the region stayed poor and pointing to institutions, land relations, administration and what he called the soft state; the title deliberately echoes Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Ambedkar, trained as an economist before he became the chief architect of the Constitution, submitted this study at the London School of Economics and published it in 1923; it traces the history of Indian currency and argues for a stable measure of value, and its reasoning fed into the debate…

Azad, who presided over the Congress during the Quit India years and became independent India's first Education Minister, dictated this account of the last phase of the freedom struggle and of Partition; his birthday, the eleventh of November, is observed as National Education Day.

Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, also published in English as Indian Home Rule, in 1909 while sailing from London to South Africa, and he cast it as a dialogue between a reader and an editor; in it he rejects industrial civilisation and modern machinery, and argues that true self-rule means rule…

Jean-Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract in 1762 with the opening claim that man is born free yet everywhere is in chains, and he held that legitimate authority rests only on the general will of the whole people, an idea that fed directly into the French Revolution and into the…

The Florentine writer Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 and it was published in 1532; it advises a ruler to judge an action by whether it preserves the state rather than by whether it is virtuous, and for this it is called the first work of modern political realism and…