Page 68 - Book News

Reddit's morality play

In book 'We Are The Nerds', author Christine Lagorio-Chafkin recounts the rise of Reddit as the oft-heard story of unexpected start-up success that then waded into controversy

City of poets

Academic readers (historians or literary critics) might find the book 'Beloved Delhi' to not be fully satisfying, and indeed having read it, one is left thirsting for more

America's interventionist zeal

In Walt's view, 'both liberal and neoconservative proponents of liberal hegemony assumed that the US could pursue this ambitious global strategy without triggering serious opposition'

'Nature's Edge' challenges complacency, alarmism about saving environment

The set of essays suggests that though the problem is global, humans must look for local experiences and solutions

Peace and war

A Chill in the Air is less action packed but more thoughtful. It covers just two years, 1939 and 1940, and captures the politics and the atmospherics from the plazas to the palazzos

What is Pakistan?

The book examines the "political mythology" around Pakistan's raison d'etre ("Why Pakistan?") and raises the question: "Who is a Pakistani?"

Amis and the 'Great' miss

One reason Amis will not be one of the "Greats" is that people mistook his characters' attitudes to be his own and assumed that the story in each book was about himself

Michelle Obama opts for empowerment over politics

Michelle Obama puts to rest any speculation about her political ambitions

A question of autonomy: How independent can independent agencies really be?

The central banker functions in all the slots and parallelly with the state, and it is but natural that there are issues of turf and tensions

A national security primer

The emphasis is on the descriptive aspects of India's national security system

From love to liberation: 'Written in History' combines solitude and company

It is true that letters sound like an anachronism in today's world; short text messages and tweets have taken away from us the ability to write a letter in the old-fashioned way.

The Shanghai connection

The book is the result of painstaking research, including poring over archival material and interviewing descendants of the prominent merchant families

Taking stock of Sebi

A regulator's job entails standing up to a variety of pulls and pressures exerted by vested interests

When home is 'always another country'

For children for whom "home" means the family unit rather than a particular location, leaving is not necessarily marked by physical movement

'The English Maharani': Queen Victoria's soft corner for India's royalty

Miles Taylor offers a meticulously researched account of a queen-empress who tried to compensate in India for the political role she was denied at home

Weighing up rationalism

Dabholkar's death vitiates the movement against superstition, and took away the chance for greater nuance in a debate that is too often hijacked by extreme voices

Book review: The rise of passive resistance

The author observes that Gandhi "learnt the important lesson that Indian crowds could be very violent" and that non-violence was not intrinsic to the culture of the sub-continent

Lost city

Readers will have enough opportunities to laugh and cry at the delectable recollections in the four short prose narratives included in this book

Paradoxes galore

The book begins with a penetrating profile of the prime minister, drawn from existing books and secondary writing on Mr Modi, as well as from personal insights, interactions and exchanges

Alan Greenspan's ode to creative destruction

The book barely mentions Mr Trump beyond condemning his "dangerous" trade policies