Ms.Holleman has written a wonderful, comprehensive book for yoga practitioners everywhere. She goes into great detail. The words she uses are inspired, and derive from her deep and long practice. She also demonstrates beautiful postures which illustrate what advanced practitioners do.

Dancing the Body of Light has been an inspiration for my personal yoga practice in the last two years. The photos of the asanas are beautiful and the instructions are very clear. Dona Holleman is able to convey how we can go beyond our physical body and find the light and joy which comes from tapping into the energy body. This book is an inspiration for all practitioners of yoga.

Dancing the Body of Light was the number one best seller at the fifth annual Yoga Journal Convention held at Estes Park, Colorado October 2000. This book is being received as a thorough, in depth yet easy to read manual on Yoga. Dona Holleman being present at this meeting is considered the teacher of many of the teachers who taught at the Convention. In her 40 years of Yoga experience she developed her own very unique way of practicing/ teaching Yoga. She is a master in her field. Dancing the Body of Light contains her wonderful insights and experience. As one of her students being present at the Convention I would say 'buy this unique book'and be inspired by it like myself and dance the Dance of the Body of Light in YOUR practice!

Sometimes it takes no more than a moment's experience to upset the rhythm built over a lifetime. This moment comes without any prior warning and stops us on our tracks, impelling us to look back on our past. It gives new colours to our intimate memories and new meanings to our experiences. Our stance and strategies for the future are recast. In other words, life does not remain the same.

All the stories in Good Girls are Bad News evolve around such defining moments. The characters, sifted from a wide variety of situations, stumble upon events which leave a lasting mark on them and they grow with their experience. Haidari Bai, the famous singer of the Mughal court achieves self-actualization in the company of Maqbool Hasan, a painter commissioned by a wealthy patron to paint her portrait. In the serene quietude of the dawn she discovers genuine admiration of her art and empathy for her situation, in the eyes of the painter. Her past life, characterized by tinsel glitter and fabricated adulation, recedes from her fast as she finds a new meaning of her existence. In `Old Fateh' an ordinary eununch slave in the service of Emperor Aurangzeb's household rises far above his despicable existence by successfully freeing a teenaged beauty from captivity.

Subhadra Sengupta, the author, was born and brought up in Old Delhi, where mighty Mughals once had their seat of power. Naturally, she has the finesse in dealing with the characters and situations of the Moghul times. Her description brings to life of the opulence of the Mughal courts with their marble pillars, Peacock Throne, splashing fountains and well laid out gardens. But she also has the discernible eye for the murkier side of this grandeur. "The Mughals pay the price of power with a lifelong distruct of fathers, brothers and sons," she goes on.

Ms Sengupta is equally clear-sighted when it comes to the the present times. The book abounds in ordinary characters going about their uneventful businesses: a sensitive, urbane widow roaming the river-banks of Varanasi planning to end her ennui by killing herself; a sensitive daughter preparing surreptitiously for a meeting with her separated father; a weary hawker-girl finding a sympathetic customer in the most unlikely household. They are all women and sensitive, acting out the agenda drawn up by a male-dominated society, until circumstances force them to work out their own survival strategies. Bineeta of `Good Girls are Bad News', though, is an exception, in that she sets her own agenda for her life, defying the rigid rules of her conservative community. "It all began when Bineeta Sen lit a cigarette in the middle of a crowded Durga Puja pandal at Delhi's Kashmere Gate grounds." This sacrilegious act immediately turns the bubbly teenager into bad news. But that is only the headlines part of it. When it comes to the `news in details' we learn that Bineeta is a `good girl' after all, with a firm grip on life. The stories vividly portray the dilemmas and surprises which life metes out to everyone. They also bring to surface the inherent strengths which underlie the seemingly weak and insignificant characters. By peppering these slices of life with occassional aphorisms and sardonic humour the author succeeds in delivering a set of touching tales.

This book examines some of the policies of Rajiv Gandhi in his first term in office, though a bit out of date (written before his assasination). Gupta shows the similarities and differences that the young Prime Minister shared with his mother- Indira. Gupta shows how this techno-reform-minded fresher to Indian politics achieves little (atleast in his first term) and resorts to some of controversial undemocratic ways of handing things like Indira Gandhi. Keep in mind that it is not a very thorough account on the man or his policies, just an introduction.