The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage
What Is to Be Done? What Is to Be Done? What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement () is a political pamphlet written by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (credited as N. Lenin) in 1901 and published in 1902. Lenin said that the article represented "a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print". Its title is inspired by the novel of the same name by the 19th century Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky. In "What Is to Be Done?", Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic