The author lists what Sanjaya Baru's new memoir, The Accidental Prime Minister, reveals about PM Manmohan Singh's multifaceted personality

'I do not want my image to be projected'

Business Standard

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, charts how to fail your way to success in a new book with entertaining anecdotes from his own life

The upside of failure: Success

S R Sharma's Life, Times And Poetry Of Mir-Taqi-Mir falls painfully short of becoming a noteworthy addition to the canon on Mir

A poet-colossus' life journey

Bibek Debroy's translation has made the Mahabharata's story of human follies even among the greats an enduring story for generations

The concept of raj dharma

The Fiction of Fact-finding questions whether the SC took an appropriate decision by appointing the SIT in the first place

Mr Modi and the Godhra factor

This book is a primer to a war as horrific as any in the 20th century

Balkan son

Those looking for a fresh insight into population issues from Bose, though, will be disappointed.

A demographer's diary

Manoj Mitta

Indian society suffers excessive reverence for authority, the author of revelatory accounts of the investigations into the 1984 and 2002 communal violence

Lunch with BS: Manoj Mitta, journalist and author

Flash Boys describes the surreal-seeming technology that replaced it

Hobbling Wall Street cowboys

Ira Trivedi's India in Love provides cutting-edge, incisive evaluation of how marriage, sexuality & love work in contemporary India

Labour of Love

The answer is there in the 34 essays in How I Did It taken from the pages of a popular column in Harvard Business Review

What it takes to be CEO

Less a political historian than a moral philosopher, Mr Davis focuses here on 19th-century transatlantic abolitionism

The price of slavery

A book on one of the most enigmatic young men of the 21st century tries to decipher what made the 29-year-old Edward Snowden blow the whistle on the world's most powerful spying agency

The snoop who's still in the cold

If the McDonald's outlet down the road were to charge the same amount of money for its McChicken and Aloo Tikki burgers, you would probably say the multinational is out to fleece you. On the other hand, if your friendly neighbourhood bhojanalaya did something similar and labelled its vegetarian sandwich "Jain Shudh Burger", chances are you will be ready to shell out a premium for it. Such is the power of marketing, and that is exactly what Ambi Parameswaran - you really need an introduction here? - has sought to explore in his new book, For God's Sake. Mr Parameswaran - okay, Dr M G Parameswaran is a 30-year advertising veteran, and is now advisor, FCB (earlier Draftfcb + Ulka Advertising) - is clearly not interested in the my-religion-is-better-than-your-religion genre of arguments that has taken on an alarming intensity these days. A compilation of essays (24 in all, spread over 258 pages if you take into account the acknowledgement and index sections) based on his own experiences, F

Divining the marketing pitch

On a Prayer is actually about Mr Birla's bonds with the people around him

Lifestyle and times of Yash Birla

From India to Palestine has focused attention on the sufferings of Palestinians and the aggressive policies that Israel pursues against Palestine

India's betrayal of Palestine

THERMONUCLEAR MONARCHYChoosing Between Democracy and DoomElaine ScarryW W Norton & Company582 pages; $35The problem posed by nuclear weapons - that they work by holding their possessors hostage, with the threat of catastrophic retaliation if used - has confounded thinking about them since the beginning of the nuclear age. One of its earliest analysts, the American physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos laboratory, which developed the atomic bomb, once compared the two dominant nuclear powers of his day and ours, the United States and Russia, to "scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life". Oppenheimer chose not to note that scorpions, a species almost as well known for belligerence as Homo sapiens, would sooner or later take that risk. We humans have not done so, at least not so far. But while circling each other warily during the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union occupied them

Absolute power

Olen Steinhauer's recent three-volume Milo Weaver series was about the Tourists, a top-secret CIA spy unit

Romancing Cairo

GODS OF SMALL THINGS: Krishen believes that there is still hope for forests in Central India if small shrines exist under trees and are worshipped by the people

Pradip Krishen's latest book is not just a chronicle of trees, but also a reminder that a part of the country is still shaped by nature

Green tales from the heart of India

Bhasha Singh's Unseen: The Truth About India's Manual Scavengers takes a look at the age-old practice of manual scavenging

Raising a stink

Sandeep Goyal remains a man in a hurry, even though he shed his adman avatar three years ago. Since he sold his 26 per cent stake in Dentsu India in 2011, Mr Goyal, now 50, has taken the Common Admission Test (CAT); launched a television channel on food; floated Mogae Media, a venture to monetise the mobile phone; and has written two books.That sense of hurry is visible all through his latest offering, Konjo: The Fighting Spirit. The 248-page book is like an airport quickie - gripping enough to be read at one go. However, some would say the author missed the opportunity to present a deeper understanding of the advertising world beyond the usual petty politicking and the extraordinary success of Dentsu India.For example, Mr Goyal says his high-flying career "inexplicably" came to a sudden halt before he embarked on the Dentsu journey. But there is no effort to answer why his sudden resignation as CEO of Zee at the young age of 40 was "inexplicable".But Mr Goyal more than makes up for th

Fighting words

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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