Page 67 - Book News

Muhammad Ali in the details

Muhammad Ali was conscious about leaving behind a rich legacy and he hoarded memories.

A conundrum called "Britishness"

This book is part of a new "ethnic noir" genre in publishing and follows a spate of memoirs by prominent Asians and Afro-Caribbeans

Between god and state

The author devotes considerable space examining religious organisations engaged in providing public services

Creating the US Supreme Court

Life of Marshall reminds us of the urgent importance of Roberts's efforts to persuade his colleagues to unite around a shared commitment to defending legitimacy of SC by rising above partisan politics

Gyan Prakash's book explains how the Emergency was allowed to happen

It is odd to find Narendra Modi's 2014 victory on page three of a book about the Emergency. But Prakash makes it work

GenNext in Indian politics

In her profiles of Rahul Gandhi and Jyotiraditya Scindia, Ms Sahgal refuses to engage with the question of why these leaders' constituencies, Amethi and Guna respectively, continue to be backward

Small steps in energy transition

For someone who doesn't know anything about the mess in Jharia, this comprehensive account offers much interesting information

The challenge of counsel

The book bears the former CEA's distinctive writing style - conversational, long sentences - with which we are familiar from his eminently readable Economic Surveys

Analysing what ails America

Someday, an intellectual historian cite both these books to lament that the contemporaries are not as eloquent that arose in Trump's era to combat the threats to our way of life

'Neta Abhineta' highlights Bollywood's muted and opportunist politics

This is the kind of book you may pick up at an airport but not feel guilty if you don't finish it

Panagariya's new book makes a timely case for free trade amid trade wars

It must be made required reading in the commerce ministry, the finance ministry and the PMO

The Parivar's mastermind

Kingshuk Nag, author of this biography, has looked at 2019 exclusively from the prism of identity politics

India, China: The past and future

Sheldon Pollock, the well-known scholar of Sanskrit, and Benjamin Elman, who is an expert on China, have edited an ambitious volume that seeks to analyse the recent histories of India and China

From physics to biosciences to Nobel

In the Gene Machine, we learn about the personalities of other great scientists and get an inkling of how the world of academic research works with all its complex rivalries, and collaborations

Interpreting colonialism in pre-partition Punjab through agrarian history

British rule in 19th-century Punjab was governed by the ideology of 'masculine paternalism', which 'celebrated restless energy on horseback'

How fugitive slaves exposed the idea of the 'United' States as a lie

The fugitive slave clause might have been enshrined in the Constitution, but it initially proved difficult to enforce

How does a book become a best-seller? Big data can help us know that

Despite the introduction of 100,000 new titles each year, only a tiny fraction of these attract a large enough readership to make The New York Times best-seller list

'Of Counsel': Arvind Subramanian on how RBI missed 'Draghi moment'

By not reacting faster to the 'twin balance sheet' crisis the RBI missed the opportunity to emulate the governor of the ECB's 'demarche of determination' in dealing with the European debt crisis

How Bing Crosby changed pop music

Crosby's weekly radio series, Kraft Music Hall, had made his voice as welcome in the American living room as Franklin Roosevelt's

When robots take the wheel

'Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future' is the first comprehensive analysis of what that will mean on the ground