Unbound's writings tell me that there's someone, in some era, who may have thought and felt the way I do today. As Annie Zaidi's introduction eloquently puts it, 'We cannot know what to do next unless we know what we have already done, or what was done to us'

Women, in their own words

Business Standard

Nobody could recall a medical press conference quite like this one. On April 12, 1955, families huddled around radios, as if listening to the World Series or a championship fight. Crowds watched on television sets lining department store windows. Work stopped in offices and factories as word spread and tearful celebrations erupted. "Polio Is Conquered," the headlines screamed. The vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, a 40-year-old University of Pittsburgh researcher, had been judged safe and effective following the largest public health experiment in our history.Americans had long worshipped their athletes, inventors and war heroes - but a medical researcher? Salk was breaking new ground, whether he liked it or not. He'd become an instant celebrity, with all the baggage it entailed. A successful vaccine against polio, a viral disease that had paralysed tens of thousands of victims, mostly children, seemed almost heaven-sent.But not everyone felt this way. As Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs makes

The knight in a white coat

This extract from Follow your Gut by Rob Knight explains how a life-saver can cause long-term harm

Antibiotics: Good poison, bad poison

Freakonomics

More random musings by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner on crime and its discontents

Book Extract: When to Rob a Bank: Freakonomics revisited

In management literature, the name Marcus Sidonius Falx won't ring a bell. Of course, it won't, he's a nobleman living in the heyday of the Roman empire. But in some ways he is a man ahead of his time, having co-created a self-help book, the kind that has been all the rage in our barbarian age.As a member of the privileged Roman nobility, Marcus Sidonius Falx presided over a vast household and extensive estates and naturally had to manage a large workforce of slaves, just as his family had done for generations. His brisk and earthy wisdom is conveyed to us through the wide-ranging research and entertaining pen of Jerry Toner, fellow and director of Classics at Churchill College, Cambridge University.Professor Toner clarifies a point for us upfront: that Falx's existence "may be a subject of academic debate". In fact, the good professor's helpful Commentary at the end of each chapter makes it clear that it is Falx who is the ghost writer, a sort of Noble Everyman created to help philist

In search of excellence in slaves

One more book on leadership; one more model that tells us that times are changing - we live in a world of VUCAI (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity and interdependence) and should instantly change; one more book that proposes a new framework of leadership; one more book that talks down to the reader; one more book that has all the "feel good" factors of leadership - systems thinking, inclusiveness and how leadership comes from within.So what is different about this book? To start with, the narrative style. The author decides that he would have a conversation with the reader and, therefore, has a one-way interaction, peppered with comments that digress; he cracks poor jokes, admonishes himself and then moves on into the classroom. It is not only irritating, but also detracts from the arguments. And this conversational style is not even consistent through the book. If that were the case, it should not have had any trace of diagrams, arrows, boxes that are more conducive to a

The leadership of elephants

What perfect timing to get this book out when the Parliament's Joint Committee is reviewing the National Democratic Alliance's (NDA's) land ordinance, which reverts to the government the power to forcibly acquire land across the country. Anyone who wants to cut through the political rhetoric that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is spinning to valiantly defend its misfired ordinance should read Jairam Ramesh and Muhammad Ali Khan's book.The book describes and justifies the provisions of the 2013 law that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had passed. It takes you through each of the salient features of the law. It details the logic, the legal basis and, to a lesser extent, the compromises reached to stitch together a law that would eventually pass the Parliamentary test.When Mr Ramesh steered the law through the Parliament, bending to build in demands from the left and the right, he drew both flak and compliments from critiques of extremely different hues. But the NDA's attempt to t

The lay of the land law

For a man who lived most of his life on camera, Ronald Reagan eludes focus. There was, and remains, a gauziness to the picture; Reagan retained, throughout his political career, the remoteness of a screen idol, though he never achieved that status as a movie actor. He was ubiquitous for decades and, as president, left a lasting imprint on America's political culture. Yet he was all the same an unknowable man - even to those nearest him. In White House meetings, he was mostly silent, often leaving his aides to guess at (and feud over) his views. In his personal relationships, he was unfailingly warm but rarely intimate. "He doesn't let anybody get too close," one observer said. "There's a wall around him." That the observer was his wife, Nancy, should give pause to any politician or pundit who claims to know what Reagan would do if he were here today. (It should, but it won't.)It should also serve as a warning to any biographer. A two-volume treatment by Lou Cannon, who covered Reagan a

Reagan's enduring enigma

ISIS book

Islamic State

One of the Arab world's most distinguished commentators has provided unique insights into how this phenomenally successful jihadi group leverages the power of the Internet for propaganda, recruitment and battlefield strategy and tactics

A new book that explores how the Islamic State clicks

Senior bureaucrats are rarely adventurous or rarely admit to being so even if they are. Going off on holidays or expeditions into the mountains may be branded as frivolities unbecoming of a staid and serious representative of the sarkar. So I was delighted that an Indian Administrative Service officer Avay Shukla took full advantage of his assignment in Himachal Pradesh to undertake some of the state's most picturesque and delightful treks, including some lesser-known ones. I have no doubt that the quality of his administrative governance would have improved as a result. In The Trails Less Travelled, Mr Shukla has described, in some detail, 12 treks in the districts of Shimla, Kinnaur, Kullu and Lahaul and Spiti, covering 20-odd years. There are convenient and easy-to-read charts showing the trekking routes he has traversed, with key geographical features well marked. These will be helpful to those who may be enthused to follow in his footsteps to one of India's most scenically beautif

Trailing indicators of destruction

Neil Gaiman depicts Baghdad as a magical city ruled by Caliph Harun al-Rashid, the legendary protagonist of One Thousand and One Nights, in his graphic short story "Ramadan". Troubled by the inevitable impermanence of the splendour of his beloved Baghdad, al-Rashid offers it to the dream god Morpheus, to preserve it forever. The story ends, abruptly, with an old man in the modern,war-ravaged Iraq capital, telling the tale to boys for cigarettes and money. Gerard Russell's Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms evokes a similar nostalgia, not just for Baghdad or Iraq but for all of West Asia, steadily spiralling into an endless conflict.A Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Mr Russell has served for 14 years as a British and United Nations diplomat in Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Kabul and Jeddah, often during the height of violence. But unlike many of his colleagues who choose to serve their terms secluded from the local population, in the safety of green zones and diplomatic

Lost horizons

This is an ambitious book. Its promise is all the more seductive because of author Nalin Mehta's background as a social scientist and media man. And because Uday Shankar, chief executive officer of Star, was supposed to co-write it, as he confesses in the introduction that he has written. The book finally took shape as a result of Mr Mehta and Mr Shankar's discussions over the past 10 years on television in India. I also picked up the book with anticipation because I had liked Mr Mehta's earlier well-researched but not very coherently put-together India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act (2008).Behind a Billion Screens goes a fair way to meet its promise - it is engaging, full of fresh anecdotes and it is much better written than Mr Mehta's earlier book. The one thing that really works is that Mr Mehta contextualises the Indian market against the US in terms of regulation, on concentration of media power and the other issues.The burden of M

What 'news television' tells us about itself

This March, a user with the name NSWGreat posted a thread on Reddit: [Complaint/ Warning] Evolution Admins Exit Scamming. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news," said NSWGreat, "…but the admins are preparing to exit scam with all the funds. … I am so sorry but Verto and Kimble have f***ed us over."And just like that, Evolution had vanished. In the roughly 18 months since the well-orchestrated Operations Onymous had taken down Silk Road, Evolution had become the top dark net, anonymous market for drugs, stolen identities and other high-value illegal commodities.Jamie Bartlett has little doubt that some version of Evolution or Silk Road will return, despite these hiccups. "It is not surprising that online drug markets exist," he writes in The Dark Net. "What is surprising is that they work." There are no regulators, buyers and sellers are anonymous, the risk of infiltration by law enforcement agencies is constant - and yet, he found, dark net markets are surprisingly reliable. Almost

The underworld at your fingertips

Through the massively ambitious Ibis trilogy, Amitav Ghosh has permanently changed and reshaped the way histories are seen and fictionalised

Book review: 'Flood of Fire' by Amitav Ghosh

The first signs of the sub-prime crisis surfaced in the United States towards the end of 2007. By the middle of 2008, the crisis had morphed into a full-blown financial catastrophe. Stock markets around the world tanked. Lending collapsed.The world economy may have been on the brink, but the publishing industry saw a boom. Books on the crisis typically fall into two categories. The first off the presses were the journalistic accounts, of which Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail proved a durable success. Later came the more thought-through academic analyses such as Raghuram Rajan's Fault Lines.Easy Money falls somewhere between these two categories. And though much has been written on the subject, Vivek Kaul, who is a columnist at Firstpost.com, manages to engage the reader. He tries to weave together detailed findings into a coherent narrative and present it in a manner that is easy to understand - even if his explanations are occasionally open to interpretation.As the title suggests

The downside of easy money

Das was privy to what went on behind closed doors when industry met government, yet he chooses to disclose littleAny journalist assigned industry associations as a beat is bound to have filed a report on the "chamber wars": that unending fight for one-upmanship between the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (Ficci). Who got the prime minister to attend an event first, who has a direct line to the finance minister, who got more coverage in the media - these are all matters of life and death for them.Tarun Das, who built CII almost single-handedly and led its secretariat till June 2004, chooses to give just a glimpse of this intense rivalry in his book, Crossing Frontiers. It is clear that he wants to play it down, but some hints do surface now and then. For instance, he writes that in the 1970s, one eye (of the Association of Indian Engineering Industry, a predecessor of CII) "was always on Ficci - to learn, to study,

Tarun Das' capitalism

As Tamil society has evolved in the time since MGR, its degrees of complexity have increased. No one person, however charismatic and capable, has since straddled both subaltern cultural semiotics and politics at once. Rajinikanth and Jayalalithaa have now essentially split these two roles between them and a few others

The resilience of MGR

God Is Not Here is full of Iraqi voices expressing outrage at the Americans

An American soldier's troubling story

Diya Sethi's brutally honest account of her battle against addiction shows that, contrary to common belief, long-lasting recovery is possible

Diya Sethi: Addicted to life

Since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, only one Silicon Valley titan seems to carry a similar air of dark mystique. This would be Elon Musk, currently the chief executive officer of the rocket company SpaceX as well as the electric-car company Tesla Motors. The 43-year-old Mr Musk is also chairman of SolarCity, the largest American solar power installation company. His wealth at the moment is estimated by Forbes to be around $13 billion, yet Mr Musk emigrated from South Africa to Canada at age 17 with barely enough money to feed himself, living off the kindness of Canadian relatives and working odd jobs - cleaning boilers, cutting wood - before ultimately signing up for undergraduate classes at Queen's University in Ontario. Not long after, Mr Musk switched to the University of Pennsylvania to study economics and physics. Then he moved west to Silicon Valley and began to build and sell companies. He is now, quite arguably, the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world.The

The technical vision of Elon Musk

Rarely did the left-wing Praja Socialist Party (PSP), the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Jana Sangh (BJS), and the liberal Swatantra Party ever find common ground throughout their existence. Fewer still were occasions when the survival of the Indian government in the Lok Sabha was contested due to conflicts taking place far way from India. And only once did India recognise a state and yet defer diplomatic ties for as long as 42 years. Such is the enigma of India's foreign policy towards Israel that it has been the cause of all these three rare occurrences.The Evolution of India's Israel Policy is a scholarly work in which the author Nicolas Blarel, an Assistant Professor of Political Science in Netherlands, develops a framework to explain the change in India's relationship with Israel. What he provides here is a dispassionate and analytically rigorous account of India's policy in West Asia.The objective of this work is to raise and answer some key empirical questions. Why did India not est

India's balancing act in West Asia

Book News: Check out for latest book news, reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

Books News: Latest Book, Book Reviews, Book Features, Book Launches | Business Standard

Check out for latest book reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

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