The book, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an, charts the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in 16th-century Europe and migration to America a century later

People of the book

Business Standard

His autobiography provides a stunning insight into the mind of an army chief who went rogue

The VK Singh manifesto

Own the Future explores the competitive imperative and the social imperative through 10 themes

Letters: Suspicious departure

In the 1960s, there used to be a professor at Delhi School of Economics called Ajit Biswas. Irritated by what had happened to economics, he once said, "An abstraction from reality is a theory but an abstraction from an abstraction is an absurdity." He was referring to what mathematical economics had become at the time.This wonderful insight and put-down came to mind while reading this eminently scholarly, readable, erudite and wide-ranging book because it epitomises an age-old question: do facts alone represent truth or can truth be gleaned from interpretations of facts?In many of these 20 (very) angry essays in this volume, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who has now emerged as an acerbic but highly respected historian, quite emphatically says yes, mere facts will do. Of course, they have to be right facts. These essays are collected here from newspapers and international periodicals over the past dozen or so years.They are an absolute delight to read because they are so deliciously catty and so

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, myth buster

Sixty-six years after it came into being, the idea of Pakistan remains a fascinating subject for historians, political scientists and students of religion. Some have seen in its realisation the triumph of malevolent imperialist conspiracies of divide and rule. Others view it as the result of the interplay between India's two principal religious communities, with the Muslim leadership being particularly intransigent and amenable to British blandishments. Still others have attempted to place "Pakistan" in the broader context of the then global resurgence of Islam, a pan-Islamic vision revolting against defeat and occupation.More recently, Pakistan has also been viewed as a British attempt to set up a client state that would provide the Western alliance with a near-permanent Muslim ally in South, West and Central Asia. It is only this long-term strategic advantage for Western interests that can explain Britain's support for the birth of this historical and geopolitical curiosity, and the

Pakistan: Zionist ideal and harsh reality

If you want to buy a pair of shoes online - now you can. Shoes, where one size does not fit all, and which a computer screen can never represent in the necessary touch-and-feel 3D. It's the same for a sweater, for jeans, a hat or earrings, all things that were once bought strictly in person, because they are supposed to fit us and make us feel good, individually, physically.Photography is one reason why. Thousands of pairs of shoes were being re-photographed when I visited a big e-commerce warehouse last year. The stylish, coiffed head of the photo department explained that the new images would give online customers a less generic and more detailed look at each pair. All angles, the sole, the material, the stitching.But the company had also applied ingeniousness. Buy a pair of shoes, they said, and we'll ship you two sizes; you pick the pair that fits just right. Consider the effort that takes. And remember the discount pricing. Admirable.This is still, however, way behind clothes shop

What the shoes show

On July 4, 2011, the British-born historian Simon Winchester took an oath to become an American citizen. It was a startling decision for someone Queen Elizabeth herself had made an officer of the Order of the British Empire not so long ago. Why the move? Mr Winchester, it seems, was in love. But it wasn't a woman who captured his heart. Mr Winchester had fallen for an entire nation.Mr Winchester's self-described "love affair" with America began when he hitchhiked across the country as a footloose kid. When he finally got his passport he felt moved to write a history of the quality that most entranced him: America's improbable, at times incomprehensible, unity. How was it, he asked, that people of such wildly different backgrounds share a "near-mystical concord" - how can such an eclectic assortment of peoples "enjoy the same rights and aspirations, encapsulated in their shared ability to declare so simply, I am an American?"His tour mixes popular history with a contemporary travelogue.

Nation builders

Jung Chang's biography makes the compelling case that China's modernisation started long before Sun Yat-sen or Mao with an extraordinary concubine who became Empress in the nineteenth century

China's original dragon lady

Sometime during the latter stages of the 2012-13 English football season, Richard Bevan, the chief executive of the League Managers Association (LMA), made a pertinent point about managers being sacked: "It's embarrassing for the game that all of those sackings are unfair dismissals. The volatility is undermining the profession." Mr Bevan made these comments following the sacking of 103 managers and coaches in 2012-13.The pressure-cooker nature of a football manager's job cannot be stated enough. Every week, decisions are scrutinised by the media, fans and experts and it is the manager who - rightly or wrongly - has to receive the brickbats. Maybe that's why the LMA commissioned management consultant Brian Carson to write a book on football managers. Titled The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football Leaders, the book tries to show how football managers cope with the pressures and demands of their coveted jobs - the larger objective is to show how their experiences could be relevant to c

The business of football

If you are looking for that one authoritative book that tells you all about the Pakistani military and its role in that country's politics - your search continues. Ishtiaq Ahmed has flubbed the opportunity to slake rising global interest in Pakistan's most powerful institution as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation draws down from Afghanistan next year. Instead, he has given us a turgid, inelegant, potted history of Pakistan that does not deserve to be on the same bookshelf as the excellent theoretical studies of Ayesha Jalal, Hasan-Askari Rizvi and Ayesha Siddiqa, or more recent historiographies by Pervez Musharraf (In the Line of Fire), Shuja Nawaz (Crossed Swords), and Mark Mazzetti (The Way of the Knife).The author apparently has the credentials to write an engaging and informative book on Pakistan. Born in Lahore around the time of Partition, Mr Ahmed now lives in Sweden and teaches at Stockholm University. But he is clearly no expert on the Pakistani military, and that shines

Pakistani history repackaged

On the evening of November 26, 2008, as heavily armed Pakistani terrorists raced to infiltrate the five-star Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and other tourist sites in Mumbai in a spectacular co-ordinated attack, the hotel's executive chef, Hemant Oberoi, feared he was falling behind.The Taj was filled with the wealthy and renowned. But there was also a wedding that night, three banquets to attend to, and a birthday party. What's more, the country's most imperious food critic, Sabina Sehgal Saikia, formerly of The Times of India, was staying on the sixth floor.Saikia rumbled unhappily. "After three days of eating and drinking," Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy write in The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel, "her body had revolted, and when her butler had come over to help, she had vomited on his shoe."The chef and the critic - one will die, the other will become a hero - are among the dozens of individuals whose stories the authors track in The Siege, a propulsive and exceedingly well-repor

Ensconced in luxury, as terror pays a visit

The shadow of the crescent moon

The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, Fatima Bhutto's 231-page debut novel, starts at 9:00 in the morning and ends at noon. With extensive use of flashback, that's enough for her to skillfully tell a gripping story of betrayal, oppression, revenge and manipulation. The novel is set in a fictional Waziristan town named Mir Ali. There are several wars happening here, all at once: people against the army, the Taliban against the people, army against the Taliban, Sunni versus Shia, drones being rained on innocents and militants alike - the list is long.If a novel is a reflection of the times, the picture that emerges is truly bleak: a million mutinies seem to be playing out in this small town. It's not just a simple clash of cultures, the old order trying its best not to yield to the new order, but a war in which there will be no clear winners. Bhutto, on her part, dismisses any suggestion that there is a clash of cultures happening within Pakistan. "It looks like a clash from outside because t

Shades of understanding

Cristiano Ronaldo and Jose Mourinho

The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football’s Leaders

Everyone wants a genius on his side, but managing it requires a special set of skills. Nowhere is this more visible in the world of football and few have successfully managed more top-flight talent than Jose Mourinho. An excerpt from The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders discusses 'The Special One's' philosophy

How to manage outrageous talent

The Weimar Republic, Germany's first experiment with democracy, was far more vibrant and influential than conventional history suggests

Weimar's forgotten legacies

Call me a fashion ignoramus but I really can't tell the difference between any shoe and Jimmy Choo. Of course, one is aware that anyone who is rich, famous, or is a fan of the show Sex and the City either has many pairs or wants many pairs. Apparently you can't refer to them as "just" shoes, but you have to say Jimmy Choo. While I couldn't care less about Jimmy Choo the shoe, the memoir of its co-founder, Tamara Mellon, In My Shoes, makes for a fascinating read.The script of Ms Mellon's life is straight out of a soap opera. She often refers to herself as the quintessential Danielle Steel heroine. "The basic Danielle Steel conceit is to take a plucky heroine, set her on a quest, and then subject her to every villain and viper and obstacle imaginable. Which, I suppose, is not an entirely bad summary of my life so far," she writes.Ms Mellon's quest has everything: a narcissistic mother, a tempestuous marriage to Matthew Mellon followed by a high-profile divorce, drug addiction, rehab stin

In her Jimmy Choos

In the 1990s, the heart of Indian publishing in English and Hindi could be mapped across Daryaganj. Rickety stairs, often half-rotted, led to establishments as varied as the Marwari Library, the old offices of Rupa & Co, Cambridge University Press, and Hans, the magazine that everyone read for Rajendra Yadav's jousting editorials.As a fledgling journalist in search of a city of writers, it gave me inordinate, if juvenile, pleasure when I discovered that the offices of Akshar Prakashan, the publishers of Hans, were brilliantly located in literary history. They could be found off Ansari Road, where pavement booksellers held court every Sunday, near Hindi Park. If you walked up from Ansari Road, you could walk past Rajendra Yadav's bustling world of printed proofs and editorials, into the Chandni Chowk described by Krishna Sobti, detour through Ahmed Ali's twilight in Delhi, and stop to pay your respects to Ghalib sahib in Ballimaran.Rajendra Yadav died on Monday at the age of 84. Mos

Nilanjana S Roy: Rajendra Yadav, Delhi's last rebel

We may scoff and turn our noses up at the priest in Unnao who has triggered a gold rush with his night-time fantasies, but we have a history of following dreams. We believe in the visions that flash before our eyes as we sleep, sceptics be damned. "The modern city of Bombay owes its genesis to a dream of three goddesses," writes Naresh Fernandes in City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay. A government contractor, Ramji Shivaji, dreamt that the goddesses Mahalaxmi, Mahakali and Mahasaraswati were unhappy because they had had to flee their original haunts in Worli and hide in the creek after Sultan Mubarak Shah's men had captured Bombay (as Mumbai was then called) in 1318. Shivaji's dream came in handy for William Hornby, the governor of the city in the early 1770s who was struggling to build a wall that would dam the creek and close the breach between the islands of the city. "Though the boats kept dumping stones into the ocean for a seawall, the dike refused to hold" and that's when S

Rubble among the waves

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, writes in his new book, The Map and the Territory, that he has been thinking about bubbles since the financial crisis of 2008. Specifically, he has been trying to understand why he and so many other economic forecasters failed to see the housing bubble that caused the crisis.The mistake, he writes, is that forecasters treated humans as rational decision makers - a functional fiction that no longer seems functional. But Mr. Greenspan sees a way forward: humans, he writes, are irrational in predictable ways. What economists like to call "the animal spirits" can be incorporated into economic models."I have recently come to appreciate that 'spirits' do in fact display 'consistencies' that can importantly enhance our ability to identify emerging asset price bubbles in equities, commodities and exchange rates - and even to anticipate the economic consequences of their ultimate collapse and recovery."This is promising stuff. It might even m

Humans can be irrational, and other insights

Reimagining India: Unlocking The Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower

McKinsey pulls in a dazzling list of luminaries to write about India, but the results are mixedWhen it comes to titling books about India, the rules of naming are as rigid as in the most orthodox of families. "[Adjective / Exhortation] India", and then, separated by a colon, a subtitle that includes some assortment of the words "energy", "diversity", "reform", "power", "growth", "next", "emerging", "potential", or "billion". McKinsey & Company, as befits its reputation, has thought superbly inside the box and named its new book Reimagining India: Unlocking The Potential of Asia's Next Superpower, which nicely hits all the high notes, while carefully pointing out that we aren't quite there yet.The book, which is due to be launched on October 31, is nominally edited by the chairman of McKinsey India and the Asia editor of the consultancy's publishing division, but is presumably in fact a group effort from interested people within the company. But why, the tired reader will ask, shoul

India as it is

It is based on Talmiz Ahmad study of historical evolution of doctrinal Islam combined with his experience of living in these countries as a diplomat

Islam's war within

Sylvia Ann Hewlett presents a strong case for a sponsor who sees furthering a protege's career as an important investment in her own career

Sponsor seekers on the prowl

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.

Page 190 - Book Reviews