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

Business Standard

A veteran reporter follows the lives of eight significant women in Indian politics

Woman power

Peter Baker writes with a measure and balance that seem transported backward in time from some more dispassionate future

A second draft of history

Srinath Raghavan's detailed history subjects the creation of Bangladesh to a credible re-examination

1971 Deconstructed

Angus Deaton takes the reader on a fascinating journey on health and inequality starting about 250 years ago

Progress and inequality

People first thought that this was going to be a simple and transitory indisposition, a blink-and-you-will-miss kind of decontamination, resulting in a brief but necessary downtime for the economy. All it needed was some minor ministrations from governments and central banks, and everything would be back to normal soon. How mistaken those optimists have been. The ruinous effects of the global financial crisis are still with us, and efforts by some of the best economists and central bankers to nudge the economy out of its languor do not seem to be having any effect.Some of the initial responses centred around pressing into action the crisis management plan perfected during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s - the grand Keynesian formula. Clearly, that has not worked, since the world economy has changed in many ways in the past 80 to 100 years. What has also changed is  the fundamental relationship between some critical variables that were assumed to be rather linear and simplis

Macroeconomics for dummies

A common joke in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, goes that the state is governed by not one but four-and-a-half chief ministers. On the top is Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav; then there are his two brothers, Ram Gopal Yadav and Shivpal Yadav; and, finally, there is the Muslim face of the party, Azam Khan. The present chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, makes up the half.This particular narrative gained credence as the 40-year-old chief minister struggled to handle the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar and the criticism his government faced over its decision to suspend the young Indian Administrative Service officer Durga Shakti Nagpal for cracking down on illegal sand mining.Provincial leaders of post-Independence India have had few biographers. It is hard to find biographies in English of leaders such as C N Annadurai, K Kamaraj and E M S Namboodiripad. In the recent past, however, this trend has changed; several biographies of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra M

In the name of the father

In The Devil That Never Dies, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen reports that there has been a worldwide rise in lethal anti-­Semitism

New chapter, old story

ONWARD THE DESCENT OF AIR INDIA

The government? The board of directors? The employees? Former Executive Director the author presents an insider's view of the fall of this storied airline in this exclusive excerpt

Who killed Air India?

Clancy's The Hunt for Red October was frequently cited as one of the greatest genre novels ever written

The master of thrillers bids adieu

German women and girls, under the Third Reich, were dissuaded from wearing make-up. They should glow from fresh air and exercise, Hitler thought, or better yet, from pregnancy."German schoolgirls were not taught subjects such as Latin, since knowledge of this kind was not necessary for future mothers," Wendy Lower writes in her disquieting new book, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Instead, girls "were given pamphlets with advice on how to pick a husband: the first question to ask a prospective mate was, 'What is your racial background?' "Ms Lower's book is partly the study of a youthquake. She scrutinises the legion of fresh-scrubbed German "baby boomers" who were born in the wake of World War I and grew up with Nazism. "Terror regimes," she notes, "feed on the idealism and energy of young people."We know plenty about the lives of young men in the Nazi regime. Ms Lower is here to fill us in further on the young women - she calls them a lost generation - who, s

Nazism's feminine side, brutal and murderous

The title is misleading. I picked up the book in the hope of learning something about the family life of the great hero of my generation, Edward Said, from the pen of his daughter. However, I should have been alerted by the subtitle: "Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American family". Almost the entire work is the story of the struggle of Najla Said to come to terms with her various identities - Palestinian, Lebanese, Christian, Arab, American.As she grew up in the United States, Ms Said was tormented by her "Arab-ness" for most of her childhood and youth. In her own eyes, she was "fat, big, hairy and weird", always conscious of "my inner ugliness" and the "weirdos" who were her parents. She was confused by the "mixed messages" in her life relating to culture, class and identity, with a deep dichotomy between the "beautiful, comforting and loving world" of her home and the outside world made up of people who were fair, blonde and beautiful.Her visit to Lebanon in 1982 was traumatic. The

The evolution of an Arab-American

The phrase "what happens on the internet stays on the internet" may read like an unoriginal variation of the famous saying about Las Vegas. But, in truth, nothing summarises the power of the World Wide Web better. We are living in an age in which the old saying "it takes money to make money" isn't valid any more. The internet is the new Las Vegas, where new business ideas and technologies are sprouting by the minute and millions are being made in the process.In Word of Mouse, Marc Ostrofsky, who is known for selling the domain name Business.com for $7.5 million, provides a treasure trove of new business ideas and case studies on how to leverage the power of the internet. From personal branding in the age of social media to how to use YouTube and database marketing to building a brand online, Mr Ostrofsky's book offers a wide range of answers to varying business needs. Moreover, he highlights the business opportunities that can be created by combining our knee-jerk and very human willin

Of mouse and man

The world becomes less complicated with a Malcolm Gladwell book in hand. Mr Gladwell raises questions - should David have won his fight with Goliath? - that are reassuringly clear even before they are answered. His answers are just tricky enough to suggest that the reader has learned something, regardless of whether that's true. A recent posting on Goodreads lauds the power of Mr Gladwell's entertaining insights into the not quite obvious. "Do you really want to be surprised all the time?" a commenter identified as Dr A Taubman asked this week about Mr Gladwell's latest, David and Goliath. "The world is disconcerting enough already."As Mr Gladwell specifies, David and Goliath sets out to explore two ideas. The first is that there is greatness and beauty in David-Goliath fights, at least when the underdog wins. The second is that "we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong" by failing to realise that giants have weaknesses, and that underdogs can accomplish the unexpected. If Da

Finding talking points among the underdogs

More than a few characters of his name match with a prominent motivational guru's but Deepak Chatterjee distances himself from the self-help tag

Pursuit of Fundamental Happiness

The Firm:The story of McKinsey and its secret influence on American business

Duff McDonald's book on McKinsey, one of the world's biggest consulting firm, should be made mandatory reading for every management education aspirant around the globeWhat is common to McDonald's and McKinsey?  This is not a non sequitur question.  Apart from the Scottish prefix they share, the two American companies, each a legend in its own field, are of comparable vintage, grew enormously in the second half of what has come to be called the American Century, became global leaders of their activities and are now generic symbols of their products: hamburgers and management consulting.  It is perhaps no coincidence that McDonald's was one of the chief examples analysed in the all-time management best-seller, In Search of Excellence (1982) by two McKinsey consultants, Tom Peters and Ben Waterman.Duff McDonald, a New York-based business journalist, traces the history of McKinsey & Company from its beginnings in 1924 or 1925 to the present in this thoroughly researched and most engagi

Consulting magic

There is a neat, precise air about The Hoot Reader. It reminds me of my no-nonsense aunt and her dicta on discipline. As you get into it, The Hoot Reader turns out to be a neat, precise, well-thought-out book on the shenanigans, proclivities and weaknesses of the Indian media. It is a finger that is wagged at us, and is wagged very well. That may make the book seem didactic, but it isn't. It has several flaws, but, largely, it holds up a mirror that reflects with uncanny accuracy the deep dark corners of the news industry and professional journalism.For anyone who has been part of the media business for the last decade, Sevanti Ninan's thehoot.org is essential reading. The founder-editor of The Hoot has been a columnist for various newspapers, including The Hindu, and has written several books on the Indian media. The website was set up in 2001 under the Media Foundation, a 34-year-old body. It was born because while "the subcontinent has plenty of media, it does not have enough scruti

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Sathnam Sanghera has given the narrative a whole new dimension with his sophisticated analysis of immigrant life in England in his two books

The imperfect immigrants

Pakistan is a nation of contradictions. It's a country created in the name of religion, where the father of the nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, wanted to build a liberal democratic state. It started as a democratic country, like India, but soon slipped into military dictatorship, which shaped Pakistan's ideology in the years that followed. It's both a victim and a promoter of religious terrorism. It's a country that proved many wrong in the past but remains the centre of global geopolitical risk assessments. It's not an easy country to understand. Apocalypse Pakistan: An Anatomy of 'the World's Most Dangerous Nation', written by two Italian journalists, Francesca Marino and Beniamino Natale, attempts to do the nearly impossible job of unravelling the mystery that is Pakistan.  Not many would disagree that Pakistan today is in a mess, though whether it's the "world's most dangerous nation" is debatable. So what went wrong? Noted Pakistan analyst Ayesha Siddiqa writes in the Foreword of th

The history and mystery of Pakistan

In the 40-odd years that America and the Soviet Union faced off in the cold war, the people who presumed to run the world started with the knowledge that it was too dangerous to attack one another. But the struggle was fierce, and what that meant in practice was that the competition played out in impoverished places like Cuba and Angola.The peace held, of course - that is, the larger peace. The US and the Soviet Union never came to blows, and the nuclear-tipped missiles never left their silos. For the third world, where the competition unfolded, it was another matter entirely.In The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, Gary J Bass, a professor of politics at Princeton, has revived the terrible and little-known story of the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, and of the sordid and disgraceful White House diplomacy that attended it. This is a dark and amazing tale, an essential reminder of the devastation wrought by the hardhearted policy and outright bigotry that typifie

Collateral damage

A new book reflects on how it will be suicidal for journalists and news organisations to remain hostage to the old structures of journalism and not adapt with the changing reality

The challenge of staying relevant

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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