It came as a great surprise to Lev Golinkin when he discovered, at the age of nine, that there was more than one town named Lafayette in the United States.It mattered to him quite a bit, since the Golinkins - Lev and his older sister, Lina, along with their parents and a grandmother - were en route to that very place, wherever it was, from Vienna, their first stop after fleeing the Soviet Union in late 1989."I found Lafayette ... again," he announced after further study of his atlas. His family, which was just getting used to the idea of settling in Louisiana, was stunned. "Are you joking?" Lina asked. "How can there be two?"Easily, it turned out. "They were everywhere," Mr Golinkin writes in A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka, his hilarious and heartbreaking story of a Jewish family's escape from oppression. "I found them in the mountains, I found them on the plains, I found them tucked into little forgotten corners. Ohio had two - in the same state! How do these people fun

Fleeing Ukraine with little more than wit

Few practitioners of fiscal policy have written about the crisis and its consequences for national fiscs. Financial and Fiscal Policies seeks to fill that gaps

Beggars' banquet

Business Standard

'No matter how [the super-rich] made their money, they have created legacies that are often kinder to them than they deserve'

Greed is great

For those of us who grew up in the pre-liberalisation days, hearing the word "baniya" being used with derision was not uncommon. A typical member of the community was supposed to be soft in body (till Yash Birla built his amazing biceps), a miser and devilishly cunning. Film after film heaped insult on him: the bloodsucking moneylender, the cold-blooded businessman, the slimy broker. In popular culture, he was the man responsible for all human misery. Everybody accepted the notion that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to reach heaven. It is only in recent years, when commercial success has come to be recognised as the success and profit is no longer a dirty word, that the worth of the community has finally been realised. With the government no longer on investment mode, it is the Baniya businessman who will create jobs, produce goods and provide services. The community's stock has never been higher.

The Baniya karma

Sachin Tendulkar

Playing It My Way

Sachin Tendulkar's autobiography, quite unlike his batting, progresses too softly and serenely to be entertaining

Sachin Tendulkar's autobiography: Playing It My Way: No big sixes here

Rajdeep Sardesai's maiden book on this year's general election has received much media attention (led chiefly by the channel with which he is currently associated) and is reportedly a best-seller.  That will surely make him a ton of money, but to this reviewer, the more important consideration is whether the book lives up to the key phrase in the title, "The Election That Changed India". I must confess that after reading the book with its large compendium of oft-told tales about elections and politics past and present, I am no better informed about why and how this election has changed India than I was before.The book takes us on a guided tour of Campaign 2014 starting with the origins of the two supposed contenders, Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. We visit a "government in ICU" that sets the backdrop to the elections and go through the heartland, meet the by now all too well-known dramatis personae of the various parties, sample media flourishes before witnessing the tsunami (author's

A guided tour of Campaign 2014

Who can doubt that Rich DeVos has everything it takes to write a great book. He has an extraordinary story to tell: how did a rank outsider - Mr DeVos was born to second-generation Dutch immigrants in rural Michigan during the Depression - make it to the top of the plutocratic world of American business? What did it take for this guy - who, at the age of 10, joined the ranks of "ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed" Americans because his father lost his job - to build a company that is counted among the top three multi-level marketing companies in the world, with operations in more than 30 countries and sales of $11.8 billion? Indeed how did a man from a two-bit mid-Western state become a globally celebrated speaker?Unfortunately, Simply Rich is far from being great, or even particularly good. The book by Amway's co-founder is so tedious and disorganised that the sundry good bits are lost in a verbal maze. The publisher should be ticked off for not holding a celebrity author to higher stan

Amway co-founder's Simply Useless advice

Rajesh Khanna

A biography of the late superstar Rajesh Khanna deftly captures his insecurity and loneliness after success ditched him

Shooting star: The mystique of Rajesh Khanna

Before retiring in 2013 as a three-star general, Mr Bolger served 35 yrs on active duty, a career culminating with two tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan

Lost horizons in the Global War on Terrorism

Far from being irrelevant, this collection of letters to state chief ministers underlines the fact that India's first prime minister was ahead of his time in many ways

Discovery of Nehru

From musty establishments in the dusty lanes of Kolkata's Burra Bazaar to towering office blocks in the financial nerve center of the country, Mumbai, the Marwaris play a crucial role in turning the wheels of the country's economy as innovators, entrepreneurs and business leaders.

What makes Marwaris a business success?

Press Trust of India

When Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, began taking credit for 'inventing' Twitter, another co-founder, Evan Williams, said: 'No, you didn't invent Twitter ... People don't invent things on the internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.'

An ecosystem for hackers, geniuses and geeks

Peter Casey, founder and executive chairman of Claddagh Resources, came to know of the Tata group quite by chance. As the head of the global recruitment and executive search company, Mr Casey learnt from a director of one of his clients that he was joining the Tata group. The name barely rang a bell. That was in 1999. In subsequent years, Mr Casey learnt more about the Tatas and even became the group's headhunter for top positions in its overseas operations. So fascinated was he by the Tatas' corporate philosophy that he decided to write a 15-page note on the group that he believed would help him in his job as a recruiter. But soon, what was supposed to be a summary expanded over time and acquired the length of a book.If Mr Casey's account of why the Tatas are the greatest company in the world appears to be an uncritical recounting of all the good things that the group has achieved in the last several decades, blame the genesis of the book. Nothing more could be realistically expected

The greatest puff job in the world?

The book, is based on extensive travels across Africa, blending detailed narratives of hardy Chinese adventurers, with analysis of the larger picture

China's empire state-building

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable

A Marshall Plan for Earth

Born over a century ago, Waugh wrote books that are remarkably contemporary. In Scoop, he poked fun at the newspaper business and (sometimes) shallow proprietors

Evelyn Waugh's sacred and profane prose

What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? How many Lego bricks are required to build a bridge between New York and London? What If offers insights leavened with humour into the way science deals with the falsifiable and the measureable

PopSci that makes you laugh, then think

Spectrum, the airwaves that enable wireless communication, has been the source of fierce controversy in India ever since India's comptroller and auditor general revealed a scandal in the allocation and pricing of this scarce resource. As the debate develops ahead of the latest auctions of spectrum, this book comes as a handy guide to the theoretical framework governing the technology and economics of spectrum.It is a comprehensive study that offers examples derived from practices around the world to illustrate the underlying principles of spectrum management. As importantly, it also offers a forward spin, with a section documenting future technologies that enable the use of spectrum spaces along with the accompanying economic rationale and policy prescriptions.This book starts with an introduction of the technology of wireless communications, proceeds to outline the economic principles that form spectrum management regimes and then presents the dynamics of the transition paths from leg

Spectrum and the policy continuum

Muslim history is diverse and complex, and so are the attempts of modern-day Muslims to cope with contemporary challenges. Mecca's history, though interesting and even important, is not the key that Muslims are seekingZiauddin Sardar begins his narrative with reflections on the character of the city of Mecca as a metaphysical entity and as the centre of the Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages. Though sensitive to the spiritual allure of the city, he pays greater attention to the terrestrial Mecca where, in his words, "lives were lived, where heroes (and villains) thrived, atrocities were committed, and greed and intolerance were the norm".In the early years of Islam itself certain historical patterns were established that would resonate through Muslim history: remarkable military and political successes alongside fierce internecine conflicts for power, first within the family, clan and tribe of the prophet himself, and later between rival claimants representing different ethnic origins who had

Mecca: spiritual sanctum and terrestrial realities

Most readers will think they know Leon Panetta's memoir, Worthy Fights, through his recent slash-and-burn interviews, damning United States President Barack Obama for his lack of toughness in Iraq and Syria, and for doing little to check the rise of Islamic terrorism there. But those who actually read his inside account of almost half a century in Washington politics will get a shock: he devotes a mere dozen or so of his nearly 500 pages to criticism of these West Asia catastrophes.The scorching interviews are out of character for Mr Panetta. He has been a careful, loyal colleague who gets things done, and his book reveals the very able and honest man who seemingly would never turn on his own.So why did Mr Panetta give those interviews? It's not like him to purposefully cripple a president of his own party whom he basically likes. Nor has he criticised the White House in order to get it to alter its West Asia policies. Indeed he says Mr Obama is currently improving those policies. His

Leon Panetta's 'Worthy Fights'

The prose is flat and caricaturist in nature. While one understands why Bhagat couldn't have used Hindi for the narrative, he makes his characters sound like men and women from American films about Indians

Book Review: Half Girlfriend is half inane, half caricature

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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