One afternoon in the summer of 2008, as the financial system was careening towards the abyss that would send the United States into the worst economic emergency  since the Great Depression, Timothy F Geithner - then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and later, President Barack Obama's Treasury secretary - tried to lighten the mood in his office with "an impromptu contest for the best metaphor for what was happening."Among the phrases suggested that day were: the wheels are "coming off the bus", the engines are "falling off the plane" and "the rivets are coming off the submarine". There were comparisons to wildfires and earthquakes, "cancer and contagion, sweaters unravelling and boulders rolling down a hill". (And this was before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September accelerated fears into an extreme panic.)It wasn't until he saw The Hurt Locker, the Oscar-winning film about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, Mr Geithner writes in his new memoir, Stress Test, that he

A memoir from the eye of a financial storm

Business Standard

Tibet: An Unfinished Story  offers a sympathetic Western perspective on Tibet

A tryst with realpolitik

All things bright and beautiful,All creatures great and small,All things wise and wonderful,The Lord God made them all.- Cecil Frances AlexanderEvolutionary biologists may quibble over the popular Anglican hymn, but one thing is clear: irrespective of how "things" and "creatures" came about on this planet, we know for sure how they are now becoming extinct. Unlike previous five mass extinctions over the past 540 million years, this time around it is not microbes or meteorites but humans that are the cause. In a short span of 20 years since the Earth Summit in 1992, the Living Planet Index of biodiversity declined 12 per cent globally and by as much as 30 per cent in the tropics.If humans are single-mindedly destroying the planet's biological diversity (or biodiversity), can they also be its saviours? Can the dismal science of economics and economists save Mother Nature? Can an economist caricatured as "someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" actually help pr

The dismal science as saviour?

A Spy Among Friends is an attempt to describe a particular sort of friendship that played an important role in history

Between friends

The English translation of Amales Tripathi's monumental work in Bengali on the Indian National Congress deserves special attention for several reasons. It is not just one more book on the well-documented theme of India's struggles for freedom between 1885 and 1947; it is also a study that deepens the levels of understanding of one of the most powerful anti-imperialist struggles in the history of colonial societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Harvard University professor Rupert Emerson concluded in the last chapter of his seminal work, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples, that there were only two models of anti-colonial struggles that deserve to be noticed across the continents: those of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi of India and Mao Zedong of China. Only these two acted as real role models for freedom fighters and, in his historical judgement, Emerson asserted that Gandhi's path of struggle for freedom was much more successful than Mao's,

India's multiple freedom struggles

David Van Reybrouck's Congo is a gripping saga of one of the world's most devastated countries

History's stranglehold

Bob Dylan said it best, in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview timed to the release of his Tempest album: "Why is it when people talk about me, they have to go crazy?" More than 50 years after he first started attracting fanatical followers, Dylan was facing a more brutal and dangerous species of devotee than he had seen before. The fans had social media, and the scholars had computers; en masse, they could track every move he made and every word he wrote, said or sang. "Dylanologist," once a derisive term for the self-styled expert who sifted through the Dylan family's garbage cans, was now a word with wide colloquial meaning, if not yet a dictionary definition.Now the world of Dylan worship has a book to call its own. David Kinney, author of The Dylanologists, is a cultist himself, but the book's opening epigraph promises a reasonable perspective. ("Fan: You don't know who I am, but I know who you are. Bob Dylan: Let's keep it that way.") And he starts with the innocent spectacle of pilgr

Living Bob Dylan's Life

Thomas Piketty's magnum opus on inequality amplifies a growing concern in the West, which probably explains why the book is more popular than its intellectual underpinnings warrant

R,G and all that

Thrive, it seems unlikely that many readers will be able to implement many of the life changes that Arianna Huffington advocates

Huffing over work-life balance

The Age of Wrath is the third volume of Abraham Eraly's four-volume history of pre-modern India

The benefits of Turkish treatment

The Wrong Enemy plots a pattern of US acquiescence to Pakistan's lethal pursuit of its perceived, but mostly exaggerated, national interests

The wrong ally

Is there a company on earth that has been more thoroughly examined at ponderous length than Apple? There are books about its early years, books about Steve Jobs' ouster from the company in 1985, and books about his triumphant return in 1997. Recently there was a book dissecting Apple's internal culture; another profiling its design wiz, Jonathan Ive; and a third charting Apple's tempestuous relationship with Google. All these volumes now orbit around Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, the definitive chronicle, considering the imperious co-founder himself opened the door to his secretive empire as he battled pancreatic cancer.Into this crowded oeuvre comes Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, a well-reported but premature evaluation of the post-Jobs era by the former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane. The book is confidently written and contains a few reporting gems for committed Apple watchers. But ultimately it falls under the weight of the unanswerable question that it p

Power outage

In this edited excerpt from Sahara: The Untold Story, journalist Tamal Bandyopadhyay recounts how the Reserve Bank of India persuaded promoter Subrata Roy to give up his Rs 20,000 crore flagship financial company

The Sahara endgame

In my final years in college, I was infatuated with the idea of being my own boss. Later, a brief experience as a locum lecturer at a Kolkata college made me feel even more strongly that I wanted to run a business of my own. Since entrepreneurship has been a dominant theme of my life, I did what I had to do: I read loads of books on (or related to) the subject.So when another book on entrepreneurship - The New Business Road Test, by John Mullins, London Business School associate professor of management practice in marketing and entrepreneurship - arrived, I looked at it with the same disdain as would a hard-nosed venture capitalist who has to scan reams of business plans that land on his table every day. The title was long and the cover had a picture of three blurred-out toy car models. I also found the subtitle intriguing: "What entrepreneurs and executives should do before writing a business plan." So I began browsing to see what the book had to offer.I was immediately impressed by M

Start me up

The reviewer argued that the principal limitation of the book was that it continued to look at Mr Modi primarily through the prism of 2002

Narendra Modi: The authorised version

The apple fell on my head the week before last, before I was even aware of Uday Mahurkar's new book.I live in the midst of telltale evidence of all-round progress in Gujarat. But well-founded arguments say that although Gujarat has on the whole prospered economically, its social development is middling at best and other states have done as well, if not better. And, critically, Gujarat was on the growth path before the advent of Narendra Modi. So, is all this excitement about the Gujarat Model and Mr Modi being its author only hype and very clever and focused marketing? I have grappled with this problem for weeks now. I have tried to answer in the same language, but none too convincingly, because these points are not without an appealing basis.Yet the good impression of Gujarat not only persists but seems to grow by the day. And people cannot be all fooled for a considerable period - the campaign and arguments for and against have been in the public domain for close to a year now.Then t

The myth of demythologising Narendra Modi

An exhaustively researched book pays tribute to a bunch of brave 'self-contained, westernised' Indians who kept rocking through the gloomy '60s and '70s

Pop psychology

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, was inspired by Mills' book, and it's a fresh and intellectually omnivorous extension of its themes

The office space we love to hate

Urbanisation in India is logically clustered into 3 sections: urban planning; finance and governance; inclusion and governance

Policy approaches to Maximum Cities

This book is a seminal contribution to understanding the Dalit question in the country

Deciphering the 'Dalit vote bank'

Corporate Fraud: The Human Factor would have been a good book on fraud had it offered detailed case studies, practical checklists

People and fraud

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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