Permanent Black

Leading conservationist and wildlife biologist Dr K. Ullas Karanth has won the prestigious J. Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership. Dr Karanth has been awarded the prize for his pioneering and outstanding leadership in conservation science through a long and distinguished career. This prize has earlier gone to--among others--Salim Ali and Jane Goodall. Permanent Black has reason to celebrate too. A couple of years ago,we published Dr Karanth's A VIEW FROM THE MACHAN : HOW SCIENCE CAN SAVE THE FRAGILE PREDATOR. It is a fascinating set of essays on saving the tiger, on how Dr Karanth was himself saved from a career in engineering, and on wildlife people like Kenneth Anderson, whom Dr Karanth knew. He did in the book what few scientists can do: he made science comprehensible to lay people. The book was reviewed favourably all over the world and is now available in paperback. Dr Karanth is also one of two series editors for our Nature, Culture, Conservation series in which many

LEELA PRASAD's ETHICS IN EVERYDAY HINDU LIFE : Narrative and Tradition in a South Indian Town has been awarded the American Academy of Religion's 2007 prize for the "Best First Book in the History of Religions." In this book she draws on a decade of ethnography in Sringeri, the pilgrimage town in South India, to explore relationships between oral narrative, ethical discourse, and the poetics of everyday language. Leela Prasad is Associate Professor of Ethics and Indian Religions at Duke University, and is currently writing her second monograph, titled ANNOTATING PASTIMES: Cultures of Narration in Colonial India. Hardback / 290 pp / ISBN 81-7824-192-7 / Rs 595 / Copublished with Columbia University Press.