Shuyao Xu Xu itibaren Dalaba, Gine
This is not so much a history of India's path to independence as much as it is a history of the partition. What's most striking about the book is the endless stories of cruelty that began literally the day after the British officially relinquished their political hold on India. The partition was essentially a two-lane highway holocaust, pockmarked by stories so horrible, you can't believe they happened. The other interesting point was how Gandhi read, and was heavily influenced by, Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience while sitting in a jail in South Africa of all places. After coming back to India, he implemented Thoreau's assertion of the individual's rights to deny the state in his political activities which ultimately forced out the British. Roughly twenty years later, MLK took Gandhi's ideas (probably in concert with Thoreau's writing) to achieve political freedom for black Americans. Kind of amazing. Thoreau wrote this essay something like 15 years before the American civil war, and while some people say, "You can't save the world", a reasonable argument could be made that Thoreau did indeed indirectly save a large chunk of it.