Page 63 - Book News

Inspiration sans instruction

Is the book instructive? Well, maybe not so much. It states the obvious in a charming way, an approach that can inspire, but cannot instruct

The club that fuelled culture

Neither fame nor public position was required, and yet a surprising number of these friends would rise to lasting greatness.

Decoding Tamil Nadu

With this book, Dr Venkatachalapathy has sought to make the state more accessible to outsiders who may be intrigued by the state, its politics, its culture and art

Corporate titans and their feet of clay

The strategic course a CEO adopts could prove to be the right one in the long run. But boards have limited patience. If results are not forthcoming in the short to medium term, they sack the CEO

Decrypting the ballot

The book compels readers to question everything they know about elections

EU's single-currency disaster

What does the future hold for the eurozone?

Unravelling the Putin enigma

The book's usefulness is marred by maddening small errors

A power-packed game, Ultimate Frisbee puts patience and integrity first

In a world obsessed with contact sports, ultimate stands out for its 'no-contact' and 'no-referee' policies

Reshaping India's fiscal architecture

Another critical but often neglected issue in India's fiscal debates is that of the phenomenal rise in the share of cesses and surcharged levied in the recent past

Distorted criticisms on GST

The author's favourite theory is that black money cannot be removed by the GST

Blaming the messenger

Mr McNamee is right that a 15-year-old company got this powerful because it learnt how to get under the skin of its users

The prosecutor doesn't rest

Mr Bharara, who enjoyed a high profile and (mostly) favourable press attention during his tenure from 2009 to 2017, does not show a lot of leg in this book, nor does he settle many scores

Bijoya Sawian is preserving Khasi culture, through stories and translations

Bijoya Sawian retold old stories and translated ancient texts for today's generation

Evan Thomas' biography of Sandra Day O'Connor sums up an overachiever

The O'Connors' marriage is at the heart of this biography

Afternoon tea and all that...

EXTRACT

Raghuram Rajan's sermons

'The Third Pillar' is a book of good intention, great thoughts, lost in a preachy style.

Journalism's advocate

The New York Times deputy general counsel David E McCraw thoughtfully addresses this state of affairs as he takes us behind the scenes of the venerable New York Times

Spicy bard

The influence of Shakespeare on Indian cinema has been so vast and has been written about so much that one would pick up the book under review with some scepticism

Pioneer across the borders

It was Begum Ra'ana who encouraged young, middle-class Muslim women to come out of purdah and train as nurses and teachers so that they could contribute to their country

A hostage to Indian justice

Mr Chandrakumar narrates details of prison life, from the abysmal conditions of the jail cell to the omnipresent threat of violence