Page 51 - Book Review

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

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?

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

Unravelling the Putin enigma

The book's usefulness is marred by maddening small errors

'The Great March of Democracy' tells the story of how India holds elections

The book underscores the point that 'election studies' make for a full-fledged subject in their own right, and can be a rewarding enterprise

Sex and memory

The title of the poem, 'Unremember' - it is the first one in the book - alerts the reader about its double anxiety

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

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

Climate change and human history

The book is marred by errors of fact and too often reads like a series of potted histories

Aryan myths

This book and the recent studies will dismay the Hindutva supporter who sees in India and its Vedic period as something pure

How Asia ruled the world

Much of this book turns on Mr Sharman's critique of what historians term the "military revolution thesis"

The road to world power

It focused on China as the key factor in this transition and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as an instrumentality in reshaping the emerging order

'An ingeniously Indian enterprise'

One critical contribution in the book is the author's focus on the "compromised fourth estate"

Contours of the 'Asian Century'

The questions raised by the author's stimulating book highlight his deft weaving together of technology, geopolitics, economics, globalisation - and the decline and rise of great powers

Mistakes that led to Trump

Tomasky writes, "is the father of the modern political party, and therefore in some sense the man we might call the godfather of polarisation"

Unmasking British rule in India

Ms Desai has built her well-documented narrative in six chapters and marshalled evidence from the British-appointed Hunter Committee inquiry into the massacre

Whose goddess is it, anyway?

Structured as a collection of 15 essays that look at Navaratri through the ages and across the social spectrum, it traces the emergence of the festival in early Sanskrit texts