Dont miss!! My Recommended Book of the Month!
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Shantaram by Gregory George Burns
The Author at a Book Signing
His Prison photo
Shantaram is an epic TRUE story spanning more than a decade of life on the run, large in every way – over 900 pages, real not only because it was, but also by the gifted writer at the helm, who’s talent and awesome ability leap forth from the first page, and that promise of greatness holds through to the novel’s end. It is a masterpiece; intelligent, thrilling, romantic, philosophical, humorous and with elements of outright horror – Shantaram has it all!
When the story begins, Greg is now on the run, after breaking out of prison in Australia, where he was convicted of armed robbery while under the influence of drugs. His life on the run takes him from New Zealand to Bombay, India. Using an alias to enter Bombay, ‘Lindsay’ attaches himself to a group of tourists to pass customs and immediately is met by a young man -- the unforgettable Prabaker -- claiming to be Bombay’s best city guide. ‘Lindsay’ meets and befriends so many wonderfully engaging, vivid people that populate this story. He joins the Indian mafia and is enthralled with and loved by its leader, exploring the father/son and philosopher/student relationships pondering good and evil, man and God. And it is here too in Bombay that he falls in love Karla. The eloquent words of love and loss Greg writes as he learns of life and who and what kind of man he is, and struggles to become, while he manages to survive on the run, are exciting mesmerizing and enthralling: a story to read and savor!
Shantaram is a thriller of the highest order: a love story that is profound and penetrating, cut bloody with truths, and seen through the eyes of a poet, philosopher, gangster, smuggler and a man on the run. -
As a young man in his twenties, Greg was a published writer and philosophy major who turned to heroin when his marriage dissolved and he lost custody of his then five-year old daughter. To support his overnight addiction he became a hold-up man who was known as The Gentleman Bandit because he was very polite and dressed in a 3-piece suit and only ever using a toy pistol. Once caught, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison. After two years, during which he endured numerous beating, Greg made up his mind to escape prison, which he accomplished, and from that moment his name was added to Australia's Most Wanted list. While Greg was Australia's 'Most Wanted' man, he set up a free first aid and diagnostic clinic for slum dwellers in one of Bombay's poorest slums. He was also a counterfeiter and a forger, working for a branch of the Bombay mafia, and at the same time Greg was also a student of some of the city's most eminent scholars and sages.
In Germany, while he was on the run, the author was the front man for a rock band; and in Bombay's Bollywood film industry he worked as a movie actor and stunt man. He was a gunrunner, active in two wars, and yet he set up a school for illiterate street kids in Bombay. When Greg was successfully recaptured in Germany and back in Australia to serve out his sentence, he spent almost 4 years of his prison time in solitary confinement where he started work on Shantaram.
Today Greg is one of Australia's most charismatic public speakers, much sought after for major events, and addressing as many as two thousand people at a time. Most recently at the Melbourne Writers Festival his three appearances were all sell-outs and his readings at bookstores (50+ appearances to date) not only draw large crowds but also seem to run on high emotion with many in the audience sharing their own personal sad and tragic experiences with Greg, often sobbing in his arms.
Greg speaks four languages and is fluent in the fields of psychology, astro-bio-and-particle physics, philosophy, comparative theology, and cosmology.
One of his hand written journals...where his book came from....
Being extradited from Germany -
A small taste....
Chapter 1
Page 1 (only)
'It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there. Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else -- with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.'
Copyright 2003 Distributed Pan Macmillan -
wah lau eh the book is thicker then telephone directory sia.. not my type
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Click here for more info.....his official website....
http://www.shantaram.com/
My own 2 cents....
Highly recommend it!!!!
Be prepared coz its a mammoth book and once you pick it up its really hard to put down! Of the many books I've read last year, this one really stands out in my mind so I had to recommend it.
His story of his life is truly amazing...how can one human being have gone through all that and still survived ??!!! he achieved the impossible and went through the darkest of experiences and came through it all with a heart and a soul that he clearly shares with you in a very open and honest way.
Theres philosophizing and its full of prose and corny metaphors and the language is a bit macho man....most girls wont appreciate it but he really sustained my interest through out the 900 pages and I couldnt help but want to know more and more. I'm now eagerly waiting for his prequel and sequel and the movie adaptation (starring Johnny Depp as him no less).
He'll bring you with him to his jail break, his escape to India - show you the inhumanity, the squallor, the pain, the darkness and also the beauty, the contentment and the love..Afghanistan...the travel, the war, the friendship...the pain...a really breathtaking story...
I have recommended it to my friends and all have raved about it in one way or another, it leaves no one untouched. Read it!