MY INDIA by Jim Corbett (Oxford: $8.95)

Jim Corbett served as a colonial administrator in northern India during the 1940s, up to the time of India’s independence and partition. The sketches in this volume of memoirs focus on his efforts to help the peasants in their struggles with poverty, disease, robbers, bureaucracy and wild animals (including the requisite man-eating tigers). Although Corbett writes with obviously sincere affection about “my friends, the poor of India,” he patronizes them furiously: Secure in his status as a lord of the Earth, he surveys the humble and meek from his lofty vantage point. A curious souvenir of the final days of the British Raj.