BOOK REVIEW: March To Opulence by Parikshit Nagesh Samant

Pages: 640
Published: April, 2017 by Opulencesix Digital Private Limited
Cover Rating: 4/5

March to Opulence is a unique book. It consists stories from different era’s and around the world. This vast number of stories of various genres, and cultures are hard to find in a single collection such that readers of different age group have access to them.

The book is divided in three sections. First section is for children and young teenagers and include some masterpieces that will definitely indulge them in the act of reading. Stories from Hans Christian Andersen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde are finest in their genres. The next section covers Teens and Youth. These stories are similar to or share those authors that are being read across the globe in their text books such as H. H. Munro, Guy de Maupassant, Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome are few to mention. The last section, with increase in the level of prose is targeted to mature audience. Reading time of most of the proses is under half an hour but it varies as few might take up to an hour or so.

In the book, editor and his team has been clear from the start regarding the target audience of the book. The main audience of the book are children and youth covering a huge range of 10 to 25 years. This is where complexity comes in handy. As the book progresses, the stories or the chapters in the book are longer, mature, and significantly complex such that specific age group is able to appreciate the initial prose targeted to. There are also reading guidelines described that I think are helpful for very young readers as it gives proper direction to perform the act of reading. One thing I would like to mention that, this book can be a great resource if your child or teenager wants to form a reading habit willingly.

Compiling these stories with increasing level of complexity to target potential readers (however, there is no hard rule for reading these stories) is a job of pure effort since a lot of research and study goes into with the least amount of being biased. Thus, I want to appreciate the effort of the editor Mr. Parikshit Nagesh Samant.

The editor has done a favour on the reader by explaining the selection criteria of the passages that the collection consists of and thus maintains the transparency with his readers. As with the multi-cultural prose the book does not contain any poetry at all. I wonder what choices of poems could have been. May be in a separate volume.

The book, in my opinion, gives a good and a positive reading experience. To help the target audience, each story consists of a brief summary at the start for a reader to understand the context. In the last section, the editorial team has been kind of to recommend the resources such as gutenberg.org and archive.org that are under public domain and hold many possibilities that are yet to be explored by me. I have been using both of them exclusively since my teenage days.

I will recommend this book to potential audience (and their parents) since it is a perfect fit to get familiar with different cultures and observe the how similar morality define us as single species regardless of the geographical location.

4 out of 5!

Buy the book from Amazon.in

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