SOURCE: "Giving Up the Perfect Diamond," in The New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1993, p. 7.

In the following review, Appiah lauds Mukherjee's The Holder of the World stating, "Ms. Mukherjee draws us with vigor and scrupulous attention to detail across time … and space … into the footsteps of not one but two extraordinary women."

We live in a time of bad news for relations among communities. From Sri Lanka to Bosnia, from South Africa to Kashmir (and, dare I add, from Paris to Los Angeles), men and women live and die within the shifting alliances and antagonisms of constantly reshaping identities. The passions of these conflicts seem to call for the martial virtues: courage, strength, honor. It is tempting, in such a time, for those of us who favor the more peaceable virtues—gentleness, mercy, the compassion that the King James Bible calls loving kindness—to treat any novel...