Page 62 - Book News

The Epic City review: Choudhury's book offers distinctive view of Calcutta

An NRI returns to the declining city of his youth and presents a distinctive if not necessarily epic picture

Society's acid tests

Ms Qureshi's Being Reshma sucks you into the trauma, the pain and the hopelessness an acid attack victim suffers day in and day out - and in the end, it makes you want to make a difference

Managing the Hydra

Had the book not been technically adequate, one could have said that the authors have tried to bite off more than they can chew

Javanka Inc

Much of the information in this book is not new but taken together, the facts suggest a Third World regime than the rule-based democracy of the world's most powerful nation

Just a civil servant

In his book, Anil Swarup narrates a host of stories surrounding his assignments, some of them linked to historic moments in contemporary Indian politics, such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid

The elliptical Mueller report

The Mueller report is hardly pleasurable to read, on textual as well as emotional grounds. It is ill-making about the amorality of an administration

Citizen Raj: Surjit Bhalla's book on polls offers a platter of tasty facts

His treatment of developments in all but the last two decades is cursory and at times not convincing

Testing cultural boundaries

Ms Gokhale speaks of the clothing quite like her reworking of Hamlet: It is as much her own as it is Shakespeare's; she has every right to re-write it from her own perspective

When the US kept immigrants out

What's most chilling about Mr Dobbs's book is how his account of the early years of World War II echoes our politics today

The UN's political record

Two major chapters of the book cover the innovative compromises that strengthened UN peacekeeping operations and military actions after the end of the Cold War

Debating austerity

At the crux of the book is the notion that when governments are facing an unsustainable debt position, it is much better to rein back deficits through spending cuts rather than tax increases

2008: The first responders' view

Firefighting is a brief account of that crucial moment by three of the most important actors

Finding Radha: A collection of essays filters her story via multiple lenses

Radha is not worshipped out of fear, nor does she have the power to redeem sinners or bestow boons

Paradoxes of progress

Review of the book - War or Peace: The Struggle For World Power

Contestations over statism

This book is an assessment of the evolution of India's political parties since independence

Mysteries of mystery writing

Ms Massey's book was at the very top of a huge pile of discards

A problem called Israel

The heart of The Lions' Den is a series of individual portraits of iconic, midcentury left-wing thinkers who wrote extensively on the idea and reality of Jewish statehood

People and the planet

Mr Morland offers remarkable insights - albeit entirely from the demographic perspective - into the progress of human society over the past two hundred years

Taming India's waters

Sunil Amrith has spent eight years chatting with Tamil fishermen and internationally-known meteorologists and traversing dusty British archives as well as the sub-continent to research this book

Mother Teresa or Dr Faustus?

Mr Gupta says his fateful September call to Mr Rajratnam, which was in a gap in a busy schedule, was about the money he was owed. Why would he tip off someone with whom he had an ongoing dispute?