Clinton Cash is proving the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy

Cheques for the Clintons

In a retelling of Julius Caesar's assassination, a leading expert on ancient military history seduces readers with a wealth of detail

A tangled skein from ancient Rome

Business Standard

What happens to Mugil? I wanted to call Rohini Mohan and ask her urgently after I had turned the last page of her book The Seasons of Trouble. That is how engrossed I had become in the lives of Mugil, Sarva and his mother, Indra, the three people through whom Ms Mohan tells us the stark reality of living through the 26-year civil war that tore Sri Lanka apart, and the long shadows of its aftermath. Released late last year, the book is a remarkable work of narrative non-fiction born of five years of reportage by a political journalist. Through the experience of the three lead characters, she skilfully draws us into a world of uncertainty, violence and trauma and the scars it leaves on each.Ms Mohan, however, chooses to be an invisible presence and lets her three protagonists build the narrative.  Through Mugil, whom she first met in a refugee camp in 2009, we get a glimpse into the life of a dedicated member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Mugil was 13 when she joined th

Living through civil war

Front page headlines of jaw-dropping venture capital investments are common in the business press these days. This was not the case 25 years ago, when the term venture capital itself would invite quizzical looks.To Venture & To Build by T Thomas, former chairman of Hindustan Unilever in India (then Hindustan Lever), is the story of Indus Venture Funds, perhaps the first venture fund to start in the early days of post-liberalisation India.The businesses then were mostly old economy and small in scale. They ranged from "recovery of lube oil base stock from waste oil to integrated processing of cotton knitted fabric". There were a few information technology companies too but generations away from the giants we know today.Many of the businesses skidded because of policy and tariff shifts and, indeed, there were many those days. Added to this were high capital costs, challenging infrastructure and a generally tough, unfriendly environment for setting up or running a business.Mr Thomas'

Lessons from an early venture capitalist

For college students or those in senior school - and for many like me who want to refresh their memories - this potted account of India's recent political history is a must read. It is tailor-made for the time-challenged younger generation: lucidly written, almost like a racy novel, and its 137 pages in large print require just about two hours to read. Yet the reader is guaranteed to emerge the richer for it since the book captures a critical era of Indian politics from the 1970s to Narendra Modi's election.The book began life as a television serial on Indian politics that the author, Vir Sanghvi, was anchoring on the 9X channel. Watching the entire serial requires seven hours, but Mr Sanghvi realised that it contained enough material - plus his own three decades of writing and interviewing as a journalist - that could not necessarily be used in the TV show to produce a book on the subject.Mr Sanghvi makes it clear that this is no profound academic tome; instead, he offers a journalist

How India's democracy came of age

"Soon enough," Alice Dreger writes at the beginning of her romp of a book, "I will get to the death threats, the sex charges, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the alien abductees, the anti-lesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with Martina Navratilova and, of course, Galileo's middle finger. But first I have to tell you a little bit about how I got into this mess."As is so often the case, what got Ms Dreger into trouble was sex. A historian of science and medicine, she criticised a group of transgender activists who had attacked a sex researcher for his findings on why some people want to change gender. Having hounded the researcher mercilessly, the activists attacked Ms Dreger, too. The bad news is that this was hard on Ms Dreger. (More on that momentarily. For now, I'll just note they called her son a "womb turd".) The good news is that from this mess emerged not only a sharp, disruptive scholar but this smart, delightful book.Galileo's Middle Finger is many things: a

Facts are sacred

Flood of Fire

Amrita Shah

Unbound

Harper Lee

On the Move

Midnight's Furies

A preview of some upcoming books to pack for the summer vacations

6 books to watch out for this summer

The author seeks to make intelligible connections among all moving parts of a megacity, with the help of characters - some unique and some like the boy next door

A megacity and its masses

The author, a former vice-president at JPMorgan in New York, writes in the introduction to Coined that his interest in money was sparked by the financial crash of 2008, which created in him an obsession to understand money. However, as he began researching the subject, it became apparent to him that to look at money through a traditional economic lens "belies the full range of what money means to us".That is the reason for Mr Sehgal's approach of coining multiple ways of thinking about money. He brings in behavioural economics (the psychology of people when making economic decisions), neuroeconomics (the examination and interpretation of brain scans of people while they make financial decisions), and even the manner in which organisms conduct exchange to survive (money is a medium of exchange, after all).The book is divided into three parts - "Mind", "Body" and "Soul". In Mind, Mr Sehgal asks why humans use money, and deploys biology, psychology and anthropology to find answers, even t

Money: mind, body and soul

Entire library shelves already groan under the weight of civil-military relations textbooks that try to explain a fascinating paradox: the contrast between the Indian and Pakistani armies. Despite their similar origins and organisation ethos, how did the former remain scrupulously apolitical while the latter evolved into a byword for military meddling in politics?Given the brainpower already applied to this question, one might imagine the last word had already been said. But Steven I Wilkinson, who is Nilekani Professor of Indian and South Asian Studies at Yale University, breaks fresh ground in zooming in on a structural fault line that he says largely explains the Pakistan Army's penchant for political intervention. Mr Wilkinson focuses on the ethnic imbalance within that army, where Punjabis form a large majority. A well-recognised tenet of civil-military relations holds that a military recruited predominantly from a narrow segment of the populace tends to become guardian of certain

That meddlesome Punjabi army

The Story briefly sketches Ms Judith Miller's early life before devoting itself to a more detailed description of her career

A reporter's mea culpa on Iraq

The Fall of the Ottomans

Third Battle of Krithia

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

A new book about the Great War looks at the less-discussed Eastern Front with a fresh perspective

End of an empire and the roots of the West Asian malaise

Following the events of the Arab Spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her latest book, Heretic, she came to the conclusion that "ordinary Muslims are ready for change." Hirsi Ali has strong thoughts on what form that change should take for Muslims: a major overhaul of their religion. "Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam's core concepts," she says, "we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion."That may sound incendiary, but for Hirsi Ali, who has renounced her own Muslim faith, the idea that Islam should and could be reformed is practically conciliatory. Until recently, she tells us, she believed "the best thing for religious believers in Islam to do was to pick another god."How Hirsi Ali came to denounce her faith was the basis for her earlier book, the global best seller Infidel, a sharp polemic against Islam nestled inside a rich literary memoir. That book transported readers to Somalia, where Hirs

Islam's heretic

Lance Price puts in a few broad strokes of Mr Modi's earlier incarnations from a chaiwalla to CM of Gujarat before getting into campaign 2014

Lonely Planet guide to Election 2014

Ron Adner's Wide Lens (2012) looked at innovations, why they succeed and why successful innovations could be business failures. He used a series of cases to build a story that was coherent and consistent. Theory-building, like innovation, is a difficult area. Innovation by definition should break the status quo and the existing understanding. Therefore, an attempt to find the "principles" of innovative business should be lauded for its courage.In doing so, the authors usually expect to decipher a pattern that can be applied on an untested area. Based on the principles, we should be able to predict success. An easier path, however, would be to put the principles upfront, or develop principles from a handful of instances and then populate each principle with multiple examples, even if the example that illustrates principle one contradicts principle six. Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu have written another book, Frugal Innovation, that follows their highly successful first book, Jugaad Inn

Frugal theories

How can the interest rate policy alone tackle the problem when what is required is supply management?

Monetary policy in a bind

The Islamic State and its atrocities - beheadings, mass executions, the enslavement of women and children, and the destruction of cultural antiquities - are in the headlines every day now. The terror group not only continues to roll through West Asia, expanding from Iraq and Syria into Libya and Yemen, but has also gained dangerous new affiliates in Egypt and Nigeria and continues to recruit foreign fighters through its sophisticated use of social media.Given the ascendance of the Islamic State (also known as Isis or Isil), it's startling to recall that in January 2014, US President Barack Obama referred to it as a "JV [junior varsity] team", suggesting that it did not pose anywhere near the sort of threat that Al Qaeda did.Since then, yards of copy and scores of pixels have been devoted to trying to chronicle and comprehend the group. Two new books pull together and analyse a lot of material on it. Although much of their coverage (on matters like the organisation's use of social media

The Isis factor

Through impressive case studies, Jon Ronson's new book draws attention to the power of public shaming in the Internet era

Jon Ronson and infamy in the age of social media

England and France, two neighbouring countries divided by a narrow channel of water, fought a famous Hundred Years War that ended in 1453. Most of Europe, too, fought internecine wars almost continuously throughout medieval and modern times, attaining lasting peace only after World War II. Perhaps this long history of war and violence is repeating itself, without leaving any lessons, in the case of the partitioned neighbours of India and Pakistan. The bone of contention is the status of divided Jammu and Kashmir and in spite of wars fought in 1947-48, 1965 and 1999, India and Pakistan have not been able to find an amicable and reasonable settlement of the dispute.In 20 well-written chapters the author meticulously collates the evidence to establish how this seemingly intractable dispute was essentially a consequence of the policies pursued by the British. The first five chapters are devoted to an account of the activities of the British colonial rulers, the Mahatma Gandhi-led national

The Kashmir question without answers

Ms Meera Mitra's book will be useful to all those who want to understand the process of change and growth that is defining India

How to beat poverty

Combatants caught in the fog of war may often be unaware of the larger context. That perspective is usually provided by historians, with the luxury of hindsight, and the liberty to dilate and compress time frames and emphasise what they choose.But the search for a broader perspective often overshadows the subaltern. How do individuals behave in the heat and confusion of battle? How do they respond when bullets are flying and civilians are being bayoneted and raped?Although countless books have been written about the birth of Bangladesh, this is perhaps the first to collect just anecdotal accounts from individuals, Indians and Bangladeshis, who were participants in the seminal events of 1971. Liberation makes no attempt at pulling back to offer perspective in telling or retelling those stories.On December 3, 1971, after months of skirmishes and guerrilla actions, India launched a multi-pronged invasion of East Pakistan. On December 16, the Pakistani commander, lieutenant general Amir Ab

1971 relived on the battlefield

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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