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

Business Standard

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

A red flying squirrel in Lansdowne

An adult male desert chinkara in Gajner, Rajasthan

INDIAN MAMMALS: A FIELD GUIDE

Naturalist Vivek Menon's latest book on India's mammals, exhaustive and thoroughly researched, will appeal as much to the lay reader as to the expert

Class: Mammalia Indica

Last fall the pugilistic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave an interview to Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine so playful and revealing that the transcript could nearly be made into a stage play and movie, in the manner of Frost/Nixon.Justice Scalia, 78, and Ms Senior, 44, faced off across a generational, political and religious chasm. The most memorable moment was probably when Justice Scalia began speaking about how Satan operates in the modern world.When Ms Senior widened her eyes, he pounced. "You're looking at me as though I'm weird," he said. "My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It's in the Gospels!" He added about her stare: "I was offended by that. I really was."This moment captures the man we meet in Bruce Allen Murphy's sweeping new intellectual biography, Scalia: A Court of One, in pea-size form. That is to say, Mr Murphy delivers to us a man driven by three fundamenta

A justice alone, even if surrounded

Of all the various disciplines in the social sciences, only economics has been obsessed with making immutable rules. Economists have liked to think of these as being like the laws of nature. The practitioners of other disciplines, on the other hand, have been content to describe and leave it at that.While many of the rules of economics have possessed descriptive completeness and predictive ability, a much greater number have not. In general, the predictive failures can be ascribed to an insufficient accounting for all the non-economic factors            that influence the behaviour of economic agents, acting singly or in groups.Within this general failure, no single sub-group of economists has been more at fault than macroeconomists. In their anxiety to catch the eye of governments, they have tended to overlook that most frustrating of all human qualities - irrationality.Eswar S Prasad's overly long and discursive but highly readable and comprehensive book is (I think) about this. He h

Why size matters

The Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan have chosen multiple sectors to illustrate their point

That unsettling feeling called globalisation

"It is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that capital could survive," David Harvey concedes towards the end of Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, "For example, by a capitalistic oligarchic elite supervising the mass genocidal elimination of much of the world's surplus and disposable population while enslaving the rest and building vast artificial gated environments to protect against the ravages of an external nature run toxic, barren and ruinously wild."This most recent book in Professor Harvey's prolific career as an anthropologist and a Marxist scholar is an attempt to read the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash through the prism of Marx's Capital, Volume I and II. Clear and concise, Seventeen Contradictions is a useful resource for those seeking steady and reasonable Marxist analyses of our troubled times.Those in search of a revolutionary handbook, however, are likely to be disappointed. The early Harvey offered an exciting and radical new way of lo

Marx is dead, and I don't feel too good myself

A 25th anniversary edition of Morgan Chua's cartoons of the events around the Tiananmen Square massacre is a chilling reminder of how states can turn against their citizens

The great squall of China

An ineffective ruler steeped in debauchery? Or a creative genius who was robbed of his throne by the East India Company? A new book by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones throws light on the life and times of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh

A celestial star

Agrasena was the legendary king of Agroha (now in the Hisar district of Haryana). It is said that 17 of his sons decided to become tradesmen. As their profession was vanijya, Hindi for commerce, they came to be called the Banias. When north India was hit by waves of invaders, the community spread to towns and villages in other parts of the country. For centuries together, they controlled commerce in the country as traders, shopkeepers, moneylenders and bankers. Some of them even financed wars and military campaigns. The most famous of them are those from the arid regions of Rajasthan - what was once called Maru Desh, or desert. Over time, they came to be collectively called the Marwaris.The rise of the Marwari community has been documented very well by several researchers. Thomas A Timberg is an old expert on the subject. His Harvard doctoral dissertation was on the rise of the Marwaris as industrialists. In 1978, he wrote The Marwaris: From Traders to Industrialists, which is recognis

It started with Plassey...

Do we need more states? The division of Andhra Pradesh has become a reality. And the verdict of the people on the division is also out. The party that was seen to be behind the division of the state, the Congress, has been routed on both sides in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. The Congress' electoral fortunes show that either the logic of the division was flawed or if there was, indeed, some solid reason for the split, it was not properly communicated to the people.A closer look at the history of the demand for a separate state of Telangana suggests that the movement that started in the 1960s and 1970s gained momentum after the state made rapid progress in the subsequent decades. That progress - not the region's relative backwardness - is seen as the catalyst that fuelled the demand for a separate state. One of the possible reasons would have been the relative marginalisation of political leaders of the Telangana region. However, no one knows better than the voters of Andh

A state of confusion

Arun Maira, unassuming and soft-spoken, is an iconic figure to those who know him. He has thought through the layers of baggage that hold India back from achieving the socio-economic growth that is its potential; he is deeply committed to charting the path forwards. As a business consultant, he has worked on system reform and the human face of change.Since 2000, at the Confederation of Indian Industry and then as member of the Planning Commission (2009-2014), he has worked at "scenario planning", a method for crafting consensus among mutually opposed stakeholders on complex eco-societal issues. The "scenario planning" method was refined in 2005, when the National Council of Applied Economic Research was brought in and predicted that the heady days of nine per cent growth would not last owing to structural deficiencies. Finally, in 2012, a quasi-official exercise at the Planning Commission threw up the same deficiencies."Scenario planning" permeates the  book, which concludes with four

Of buffaloes, peacocks, tigers and fireflies

Hard Choices is a statesmanlike document intended to attest to Ms Clinton's wide-ranging experience on national security and on foreign policy

Hillary Clinton, in her own words

Tom Bower's new book offers an alternative view of entrepreneur Richard Branson, drawing attention to the need to dig deeper into business excesses

The Branson story you didn't know

I remember the first time I was in the kitchen with Maya Angelou. It happened in Sonoma, California, some 40 years ago. A mutual friend had been invited to spend a week, and I trailed along. Angelou maintained a home in that Mediterranean-looking town of red tile roofs in the wine country, complete with a guest suite in which we were comfortably ensconced. At dinnertime we walked up to the main house.The kitchen had an open plan, with a fireplace in the dining area, and I remember her burning lavender in a fire shovel, which perfumed the entire space in an aromatic prelude to what was to come.Then it was time to cook; the meal was a 12-boy curry. She explained that the dish, a British colonial curry, was named for the number of servants who would carry the condiments to the table; the more boys, the more prestigious the curry. I do not remember all of the 12 condiments (or if in fact there were 12), but they ranged from chopped peanuts to Major Grey's chutney. I do not remember the tas

A way with words and pans

Technology becomes meaningful, Biz Stone writes, only when people use it in ways that change their world and quality of life

@serendipity

The author lists three must-reads ahead of the FIFA World Cup this year

FIFA World Cup books: It's a hat-trick

This book consists of 10 papers focussing on the theme embodied in the title, from different perspectives. As with all Reserve Bank of India (RBI) publications, the introductory chapter carries a brief yet comprehensive summary of the central thrust of the papers.The first paper by the former governor, D Subbarao, elaborates on how the Lehman crisis followed by the Euro zone debt crisis changed the theology of central banking in a fundamental way. Post-Lehman, financial stability drew attention. He also highlights how the Euro zone Sovereign debt crisis opened the eyes of the central bankers to the concerns arising out of sovereign debt sustainability and its linkages with financial stability. In the later pages he articulates apprehensions about how the US Federal Reserve/European Central Bank steps to secure financial stability could endanger price stability thus introducing the 'Trilemma'. A detour into the etymology of Trilemmas as also a discussion of Mundell's famous 'impossible'

New trilemmas of monetary policy

The book walks you through the process of setting up a business from planning to execution, with handy checklists, case studies and model business plans

Advice from the launch pad

Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived. Of that, there is very little dispute. He was also, at the apex of his career, a global ambassador for the game and for Nike (not necessarily in that order), a veritable ATM for various corporate partners, a hero to millions, if not billions, of fans, and very likely the most famous person in the world. I know this because everyone knows it, and also because I witnessed at least a little bit of it all. I covered Jordan and the Bulls for an all-sports radio station in Chicago for four years while he was at the height of his power and fame.It was an experience I never cease reliving, in the same way you would never forget being allowed to watch Picasso paint or Mozart tinker at a piano. I have made these analogies before and will defend them to the death. Michael Jordan absolutely was an artist on the basketball court, every bit the equal in his milieu of any of the great masters in theirs. Whatever his flaws away from the

His Airness

Former Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi's book is a paean to the elections and their quinquennial recurrence

The bureaucrat in his labyrinth

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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