Part ethnographic account, part historical narrative, this work analyses the problems that have consistently plagued this ethnic group

The pashtun conundrum

Business Standard

Mid-wicket Tales is well worth reading for some unexplored insight into India's world of celebrity cricket

Bowled over by cricket

This book is a focused and timely analysis of what has gone badly wrong in Pakistan, and what could be done to correct the situation

Pakistan's call to arms

If you are one of those people who on seeing newspaper headlines like "RBI keeps repo rate unchanged" or "Rupee drops by 8%" wonders what the fuss is all about and are curious to know more, there are three recent books from Oxford University Press that are worth checking out. Each of these books is slim enough (150 pages or so) and small enough (seven inches by five inches) to fit in your trouser pocket (or purse, if you are a woman) to quickly read through on a Mumbai-Delhi flight.When the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) insists on keeping the interest rate high, and thereby keeps the equated monthly instalment on your home and car loans punishingly high, is it doing the right thing? What stops the RBI from dropping the interest rate drastically and letting us all go on a buying spree?  Should we believe the RBI when it says it is keeping interest rates high to stave off inflation, which, if left uncontrolled, will make all things we buy more expensive? What makes the RBI believe that suc

Book value on basic economics

In his 2007 book, A Farewell to Alms, the economic historian Gregory Clark argued that the English came to rule the world largely because their rich outbred their poor, and, thus, embedded their superior genes and values throughout the nation. In her comprehensive takedown, the historian Deirdre N McCloskey noted that Mr Clark's idea was a "bold hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists such as Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in the century before last". Indeed, over the past 150 years, various white Western scientists and writers have repeatedly offered biological explanations for Caucasian superiority. They have repeatedly failed because, as Ms McCloskey noted, none ever mounted a credible quantitative argument.Now, in A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, says modern genetics shows that "the three major races" - Africans, Caucasians and East Asians - are genetically distinct races that diverge much

The fault in our DNA

A former radio newsreader has produced a thought-provoking account of a British military camera team's attempts to relay good news from Afghanistan at the height of the insurgency

A journeyman's candid camera

Contestants on Jeopardy! this week were asked to identify the book that opens with this line: "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton." The answer (or rather the question) was: What is The Sun Also Rises?Yet, as a new edition of this 1926 classic by Ernest Hemingway shows, up until the final galleys, Cohn's college feats were not even included in the opening chapter. Originally, Hemingway began his tale of the Lost Generation by introducing its beautiful and heartsick embodiment, Brett Ashley: "This is a novel about a lady."This discarded first chapter, along with other deletions, earlier drafts and alternate titles, is included in a new edition of the novel that Scribner is releasing later this month. The glimpse into Hemingway's creative process is not new. As the author's grandson Seán Hemingway explained in an interview, "While the material has been discussed at great length by scholars, it hasn't been brought together in this way before, and it hasn't been

Hemingway's novel reissued with alternate opening

The Arsenal of Democracy, the Ford Motor Company and its production of the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber take centre stage

Bombers' early light

The book is packed with theory, policy and data, based on which several issues are analysed with broad sweep and outstanding depth

The fall and rise of developing countries

C Christine Fair's new book on the Pakistan Army turns out to be an informative primer on the strategic and political evolution of Pakistan

Reading the tea leaves in Pakistan

Having spent time critiquing films and being an avid reader of thrillers, I have often wondered - not without apprehension - why Bollywood has not picked up the formula of "tiger-poaching-dashing, forest officer-dazzling reporter". To my mind, this combination makes for a perfect or imperfect potboiler, depending on which way you look at it. So it is surprising that when this masala formula finally makes it to the popular media, albeit in print rather than onscreen, it is via a bureaucrat.The author, an Indian Administrative Services officer, pens a fast-paced thriller based in Madhya Pradesh's Kanha Tiger Reserve, though it travels on to assorted exotic locales - from ancient Amarkantak, source of the holy Narmada, to  Mumbai, Myanmar, Kalimantan, China and the US. But I hasten to add that the book comes as a pleasant surprise, for not only is it a good, racy read, but it also quelled my apprehensions, given the potential for such a plot to go awry or lack the  finesse and sensitivity

Tiger poaching burning bright

Though J K Rowling breaks no new ground with her latest thriller, The Silkworm, the book still is an entertaining take on the traditional British crime novel

Killer Plot

Green Wars is very important reading material for budding environmentalists, environmental reporters and civil society activists

Just how much is too much?

For someone like me who has spent a lifetime in the tax department and researching tax systems, it is not easy to complete a review quickly, since I typically tend to agree or disagree with the author's views. But this is not the place to air them elaborately as the space is limited. Suffice it to say that this voluminous compendium of principles and applications of taxation should be a constant companion for anyone interested in all sorts of taxes and their working in various countries. What the Shorter Oxford Dictionary is for a writer in English, this book is for the tax analyst; it contains everything.Overall, the scope of the coverage is very wide. Beginning with historical references to taxation in India, the book goes on to discuss the incidence and distribution effects of taxation, particularly the impact on efficiency and resource allocation. When taxation is not neutral, it has a distortionary effect, which is neither known nor discussed. There is considerable emphasis on con

The go-to tax compendium

Sahara, The Untold Story provides interesting and rare insights into how the regulators - mostly RBI in this case - went after Roy like hounds

The poor little rich man

Somewhere along the long, bumpy road of human evolution - between the emergence of Davos Man and the TEDification of everything - a new breed of journalist emerged, specially adapted to the corporatised landscape of the modern media biome. Call him Aspen Man, after his proclivity for Ideas. (Aspen Woman exists, too, but the breed skews male.) Like all journalists, Aspen Man feeds upon stories, studies and statistics, but his unique genius lies in his ability to transform the resulting partly digested mix into brain candy for well-heeled aficionados of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman.The Economist's editor in chief, John Micklethwait, and its management editor, Adrian Wooldridge, are exemplary specimens of Aspen Man. Their thesis: for 500 years, the West's ability to reinvent the state has enabled it to lead the world. Today, however, the West is weighed down by dysfunctional governments, bloated budgets and self-indulgent publics; it risks losing its edge to the hungrier, more aut

Aspen Man's world view

The conservative Bavarian prince who managed the Rolling Stones' finances for 40 years has written a wryly amusing and fascinating memoir of life with the world's most famous rock band

Serving their satanic majesties

In The Train to Warsaw, the author forgoes quotation marks, indentations and line breaks with dialogue, allowing the words of her characters to roll into one another like a kind of psychic enjambment

Remembrance of things painful

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."- George SantayanaThe recent international financial meltdown following the failure of two hedge funds owned by the US investment bank  Bear Stearns and the subprime crisis has spawned a large number of books that review similar episodes in the past, in an effort to trace the common threads through them and the lessons to be learnt. Bob Swarup's book belongs to this genre. He has organised the material not by chronology but around common human foibles. It deals with 25 centuries of financial bubbles, investment manias and human folly with historical details relating to the period from ancient Rome to the crisis of 2008. As the blurb on the back cover says: "Greek bailouts of the fourth century BC, the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Dutch love affair with tulips, bicycle and railroad booms in the 19th century, the Great Depression, the brief ascent of the Japanese to the Hollywood villain totem pole, virtual bank runs in

Booms, busts and human nature

If there were still any doubts about Hillary Clinton's intention to stand for US president in 2016, her latest book, Hard Choices, should finally lay them to rest. This is a very carefully measured account of her four years as US secretary of state from 2008 to 2012, with tensions with the Barack Obama White House only discreetly hinted at. We know from other sources that the bitterness and bad blood from the campaign for Democratic Party nomination lingered on in the aftermath, but Hard Choices portrays a more convivial relationship. As she herself says, in the early pages, "... I also knew the press would be looking - even hoping - for any signs of discord between me and the White House. I intended to deprive them of that story." The book also describes a relationship of mutual trust and respect between her and husband, Bill Clinton, with no hint of the storms that buffeted it in the wake of his serial philandering in the White House. Here he appears, as always, supportive - a friend

Playing it safe

In early 1990, when Indian political reporting was widening its base from limited and structured coverage of government and Opposition politics, this writer was told by a newspaper's political bureau chief of that time to go and spend some time with Kanshiram. Parliamentary polls were held a few months before that and Rajiv Gandhi had been unseated. Assembly elections were being held in several states and, though the paper for which I was working was still at the "dummy stage", it appeared to be a good idea to spend time with the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which performed creditably without winning any seats.Caste was one issue that was yet be embedded in journalistic discourse. The only time that one heard - or wrote - about caste combinations was when it came to talking about Ahir-Jat-Gujjar-Rajput or Muslim-Ahir-Jat-Gujjar-Rajput combinations that were forged from the time Charan Singh experimented with alternative vote banks to replace the Congress combination of Brah

The will of a disruptor

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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