Frederick Taylor pays more attention to the economic issues of the 1920s, but even then what he really seems to want to write about is the general craziness that was Weimar GermanyFrederick Taylor's The Downfall of Money promises, on its jacket, to deliver "an economic horror story". A horror it was: we've all seen the photos from Germany with the wheelbarrows full of cash or the children playfully stacking bricks of worthless bills (by late 1923 the mark had deteriorated from a value of 4.2 to the dollar in 1914 to over four trillion). The monetary crisis was so traumatic that to this day, it renders the German people thoroughly allergic to price increases.But despite its title, this book is primarily concerned not with money but with everything else the Germans were also concerned with from 1914 to about 1929: military strategy, starvation, assassinations (of people good and bad), putsches (fruitless and fruitful), foreign occupation, riots, strikes and pretty much every other permut

Remembering Weimar Germany

Business Standard

It is rare to read a book on boardrooms and think that much of what it says can be implemented in Indian companies. Every Indian board member, aspiring director and senior executive should read this book.A collaborative effort by three eminent American consultants with different perspectives, the book takes the reader into boardrooms around the world, though from an American boardroom perspective. It provides a road map for good corporate governance and discusses best practices in boardrooms. The book aims to outline when boards should lead; when boards should partner with management; and when boards should stay out of the way of management rather than just monitor management.The reader is taken into boardrooms of many multinational companies -  Apple, HP, Ford, BHP Billiton, P&G, GSK, Delphi, Lenovo, Grupo RBS, Rohm and Haas, Motorola, HBOS, among others. The reader is taken through events that changed the history of many of these companies. Indian companies such as Infosys, Airte

On board with best practices

In the preface, the author declares this book is neither an autobiography nor a memoir, but rather "a look at the practice of Indian diplomacy at a micro-level". Such studies are all too rare, which makes this work especially welcome. The book's title comes from Donald Rumsfeld, the established articulator of profundities who gave us the phrase "known unknowns, and unknown unknowns" as a guide to prognostication.The author identifies information and access as the two essentials of diplomacy, adding to that knowledge of foreign languages, which is connected with access. The value assigned to language skills is especially welcome, as is former ambassador Rajendra Abhyankar's experience in learning languages on the fly at his varied assignments, which is what he accomplished with Italian, Arabic and Turkish - such felicity is rare. One would add to the list of professional essentials a flair for outreach, which involves people skills and, above all, personal credibility. These are the ass

Happening stuff

It is completely appropriate that the books editor of this newspaper should have asked me to review these three books

Tamil Nadu's 'non-Brahmin' trinity

An unusual biography of the legend built from quotes, easily accessible to the public, is a fitting polychromatic tribute

A Jimi Hendrix experience

When cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco sets out to chronicle something, be sure of the relentless objectivity, wry humour and brevity that tell a story more effectively than a wordy Pulitzer-winning treatise. Like R K Laxman's Common Man, Mr Sacco is usually a bemused participant in the events he records, and the message is always searing - whether it is the Dalit experience in Kushinagar (Caravan, January 2012) or Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel. Given his penchant for conflict zones, The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme is a fitting start to the centennial year of World War I, although here he plays the role of historian rather than journalist.It would be inaccurate to describe this as an illustrated novel or even a book. It is, in fact, a 24-foot panorama that unfurls accordion-style to illustrate an event that symbolises the appalling human cost of war. A slim accompanying booklet contains an excerpt from Adam Hochschild's readable 2011 book To

War in graphic detail

To write about one's country while living in another is to invite questions about loyalty. Why are you writing this? And for whom? The questions can take an ominous tone: what is your agenda? The journalist Hooman Majd faced such suspicions on one of his trips to Tehran, when an employee from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance told him bluntly: "Just because you have an Iranian passport doesn't mean you can come here and write whatever you want when you leave."It was partly in an attempt to gain a wider perspective on the country of his birth that Mr Majd, who lives in Brooklyn, took his American wife and infant son to live in Tehran for one year. "The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay" is a memoir of 2011, spent reconnecting with the homeland he left as a baby, when his father, then a career diplomat, was posted abroad. With the help of friends and family, Mr Majd and his wife, Karri, a yoga instructor, quickly find an apartment, set up an internet connection, hir

Guests of the Ayatollah

The story of Sikh extremism and police action in Punjab is loaded with violence, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, betrayal and high drama. It created an eternal night of pervasive terror in that state until K P S Gill - and substantially he alone - ended it. In that sense, Rahul Chandan's book, KPS Gill: The Paramount Cop, raises the valid point that Mr Gill deserves a proper appreciation of his contribution to the cause of national unity.Mr Gill's eminence as an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer may be the core point of the book and the author establishes that fact with some interesting anecdotes about the man, revealing his hard-boiled professionalism as well as his daring and humane sides. The effectiveness of this message, however, is diminished by the biographer's penchant for unrealistic hyperbole, notably comparing Mr Gill's performance as a policeman to that of famous military leaders such as Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery.But why blame Mr Chandan alone?

Punjab's Gill complex

In the late 1990s and the early noughties, I remember watching Land of the Tiger, a BBC series anchored by Valmik Thapar. A decade and a half later, Mr Thapar is back, as burly as he was back then, although his hair and beard have many more flecks of grey. He continues to do what he does best: chronicle the Indian subcontinent's native tiger species, the Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), in obsessive detail. He is also much more bitter now than he was when I first watched him years ago, disappointed with the system that does nothing to protect the creature he loves most - an almost broken-hearted man, it would be fair to say.Which is what brings us to why this book was written in the first place. When he started writing Tiger Fire some three years ago, Mr Thapar had already written 20-odd books and taken thousands of photographs, as well as made many documentaries and films on the tiger. As he admits in the introduction, the objective of Tiger Fire was "to bring together the very

The tiger man's ode to his muse

Why do English speakers say "drove" rather than "drived"? As graduate students at the Harvard Programme for Evolutionary Dynamics about eight years ago, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel pondered the matter and decided that something like natural selection might be at work. In English, the "-ed" past-tense ending of Proto-Germanic, like a superior life form, drove out the Proto-Indo-European system of indicating tenses by vowel changes. Only the small class of verbs we know as irregular managed to resist.To test this evolutionary premise, Mr Aiden and Mr Michel wound up inventing something they call culturomics, the use of huge amounts of digital information to track changes in language, culture and history. Their quest is the subject of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, an entertaining tour of the authors' big data adventure, whose implications they wildly oversell.To tackle the drived/drove question, Mr Aiden and Mr Michel assigned two undergraduates to read every tex

Big Data becomes a mirror

Everyone who grew up in Delhi in the 1950s and early 1960s simply must read this book

Dilli meri jaan

The author chooses the best fiction and non-fiction fare for the coming year

2014 in books

A football fan scanning the list of matches in this book may initially find Jim White's selection odd. Leeds versus Charlton Athletic in 2004 - seriously? What's with Portsmouth versus Reading in 2007? Anyone remember Queen's Park Rangers versus Stoke in 2013? Start reading and it becomes clear that Mr White has been faithful to the subtitle. This is not a "best of" compilation, though some of these matches were classics. It is a sporting history written in a strikingly original way. Each of the 10 matches highlights some element of or turning point in the history of a tournament that completes its 21st year this year and has done more than any other to popularise football around the world.The Premier League embodies the globalisation of the sports business, thanks to the digital age - Indians fans watched the same games with the rest of the world long before they got to see Homeland and Castle at the same time as America. It also reflects a level of commercialisation in the sports bus

Football at fever pitch

President John F Kennedy once remarked that "in 1914, with most of the world already plunged in war, Prince Bulow, the former German chancellor, said to the then-chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg: 'How did it all happen?' And Bethmann-Hollweg replied: 'Ah, if only one knew.' If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war," Kennedy went on, "if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, 'How did it all happen?' and to receive the incredible reply, 'Ah, if only one knew.' "The anecdote about World War I came from Barbara Tuchman's best-selling history The Guns of August, in which Tuchman explored the immediate origins and first weeks of the war. The book inspired Kennedy to install a tape system in the White House, including the Oval Office, to ensure an accurate record of decision-making. It was still on his mind as he confronted the Cuban missile crisis. "I am not," the president told his brot

How did it all happen?

Sudhir Venkatesh shot to fame with his book Gang Leader for a Day and with his contributions to the chapters in Freakonomics in which he analysed the behaviour of drug peddlers and sex workers. Gang Leader for a Day was a departure from the usual works of sociology - from known frameworks of social structures towards a participative, ethnographic work. It was groundbreaking in many ways: because of the methods; the ethical dilemma that these methods raised; and the subject, which looked deeply into Chicago's underground drug economy. This work was a result of a much younger Venkatesh, a relatively unknown student trying to get going on his doctoral thesis and not trapped by fame.So, when Mr Venkatesh's next book came out, which looked at a different trade and a different city, he had already set the benchmark with Gang Leader for a Day and was expected to transcend that pinnacle. Floating City, however, disappoints. It is not rich in either content or insights, leaving us to wonder whe

A professor's notes from the underground

The lobby of the Idanha Hotel in Boise, Idaho, was the scene of great excitement in the spring and summer of 1907. There, most mornings, sat a large man with a luxurious, curled moustache, smoking cigars and loudly holding forth, surrounded by newspaper reporters and gawping onlookers. Behind him, guarding against the threat of assassination, stood a former cowboy, armed with a Colt .45 and a 20-inch blade hidden inside a walking stick. "Most pass by with awed looks," a witness wrote, "while some few are proud to be seen sitting alongside and basking in the great man's halo." One of those who stopped to stare was the actress Ethel Barrymore, in town with a touring company. The object of curiosity introduced himself: "I'm a Pinkerton man."James McParland was not just a Pinkerton man. He was the living embodiment of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, the most famous sleuth in America's first detective organisation, a figure who inspired adulation and loathing in roughly equal measure

A law unto himself

This distilled version of the Ramayana deprives the myth of its inherent multi-faceted dynamism and Sita of her personality

Sita: An 'Asian Princess' story

Mushirul Hasan is a prolific writer who has authored and edited many reputed scholarly works on modern Indian history. This edited volume, titled Islam, Pluralism, Nationhood: Legacy of Maulana Azad, consists of brief introductions on very special documents dealing with key developments in the life of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. By collecting and publishing these rare documents - confidential facsimiles of memos, notes and letters, which have been lying in government files - the author has enriched the discourse on Azad's contribution to Indian national public life. This is all the more important since, as Professor Hasan points out, "information on Azad's role after Independence is thin".Azad's life story can be understood if it is kept in mind that he was an Islamist scholar by training, with an early education that spanned Mecca, Calcutta and the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental college, Aligarh (later Aligarh Muslim University). But his grounding went much beyond his roots as a scholar of th

Maulana Azad's contested legacy

Khadija, the first person to convert to Islam, is believed to have been 40 and twice widowed when she married the Prophet  Muhammad, who is said to have been 15 years younger than her. The community approved of the match. Compare this to the lives of many Muslim women today, and the absence of the essential freedom to make choices becomes starkly visibly.Yet, in this essentially male world, where women and their stories, dreams and desires are missing even from literature and poetry, there are those who are risking it all for the sake of love. It is the stories of such women that Nighat M Gandhi brings out in her book, Alternative Realities: Love in the Lives of Muslim Women. It's a labour of love that takes Ms Gandhi through the three countries she calls home: Bangladesh (where she was born), Pakistan (where she was raised) and India (where she married). Yet, in what is both a poetic and painful contradiction, there's the realisation that although she belongs to all three countries, s

Love in the time of fundamentalism

In a field like agriculture, it is often unrewarding to project the future by taking cues purely from the past. Yet, most agricultural economists tend to do just that. Yoginder K Alagh, a leading farm economist and a prolific author, has done much the same in this book, even though he has quoted several instances where such prognoses by various scholars - including himself - have proved tenuous. To be fair, he has not disregarded current realities that could have a bearing on Indian agriculture in the near future, but he has not fully capitalised on them, either, to paint a clear picture of tomorrow's farm sector.A major problem with trend-based projections for the future is the dearth of up-to-date statistics and their poor quality and low credibility. Most of the statistics, including those from official sources, are usually available with a considerable time lag. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the numbers presented in this book and used for drawing conclusions in many cases are fairly o

Yesterday's harvest

"The genius of you Americans," the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser teasingly told a senior CIA official, Miles A Copeland Jr, in the late 1950s, "is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves."By then, Nasser had good reason to gloat. For years, the State Department and the CIA had sought to marginalise - if not altogether eliminate - the upstart Egyptian leader. Instead, through a colossal series of missteps, the Eisenhower administration had helped catapult Nasser onto the global stage, where he became the undisputed spokesman for Pan-Arab nationalism and the United States' chief nemesis in the Middle East.If hard to imagine today, there were two distinct moments when the US was regarded as a beacon of hope to the peoples of the Middle East. The first opportunity was thrown away at the end of World War I when, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab leaders sued for either independence or American conservatorship, believing that the nation's

How the Middle East was lost

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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