Page 2 - Book

The CIA Book Club reveals how the West won minds behind the Iron Curtain

How the CIA, instead of pursuing scandalous swashbuckling interventions, smuggled books to weaken the Iron Curtain and offer Eastern Europe a glimpse of an alternative future

Kiran Desai returns to Booker longlist with new novel after 19 years

Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai on Tuesday returned to the coveted literary award longlist with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny', a novel described by the judges as a vast and immersive tale about a pair of young Indians in America. The 53-year-old Delhi-born author, who won the Booker Prize 19 years ago in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss', joins 12 writers from around the world for the so-called Booker Dozen of 13 books that will be whittled down to six shortlisted titles by September. Desai's latest novel stands out as the longest on the longlist, weighing in at 667 pages and published by Hamish Hamilton. The shortest is "Universality" by Natasha Brown at 156 pages. "She has spent almost 20 years writing The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny'. Should she win this year, she would become the fifth double winner in the prize's 56-year history, Booker Prize Foundation said in a statement. Desai has a family history with the prize: her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted for th

Children of Radium: 'Digging for Trauma' in Nazi Germany's History

In the course of his research, Dunthorne makes multiple visits to Germany and tries to retrace and recreate his great-grandfather's life

H.I.T. Investing: A new book the balance between purpose and profit

It is hard to fathom how any organisation could build a sustainable business by offering high-quality products at affordable prices, but many have done just that. H.I.T. Investing tells their stories

The Mission: Tim Weiner's book explains how the CIA lost its way

Throughout The Mission, Weiner hammers on an agency that seems to be repeatedly blinded by its sense of American supremacy

Lesley Downer's new book offers a grand panoramic tour of Japan's history

Japan has received far more than its share of natural disasters, most massive earthquakes, volcano eruptions, gigantic tsunamis and ravaging fires

The Stoic Capitalist: Ancient Greek philosophy meets the American Dream

The ancient Greek philosophy lives on as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Here's how to use its principles to handle real-life situations and build a life of your dreams

Widows: Schipper's eight chapters offer deep insight into grieving, rights

The eight chapters of Schipper's magisterial work offers a deep understanding into such issues as the kind of grieving is considered acceptable for a widow

Rivers as kin, not property: A powerful case for ecological empathy

There is hope that we can conserve what remains and revive what has been lost of our rivers - but it begins with acknowledging that a river is a living, breathing entity

Tibet at one remove: Little Lhasa maps a people's emotional geography

How, by a historical accident, India, despite her own poverty and exploding population, became an ideal home for exiled Tibetans

Luis Alvarez deserved a livelier biography than Collisions offers

Nevala-Lee recounts succession of events that followed: degrees from University of Chicago and a long, illustrious career, most of it at Berkeley. Alvarez was ambitious, arrogant and often prickly

Caroline Fraser uncovers a second, darker perp behind US serial killings

Studies are beginning to link childhood lead exposure with aggression, psychopathy and crime. Fascinatingly, all the serial killers in Murderland lived near areas with high lead levels in the air

Phil Craig tracks Allied powers' duplicitous endgame in Asian colonies

Operation Semut typified the Allied betrayal of Atlantic Charter ideals. It's a pity Mr Craig overlooks similar betrayals of the Nagas and others who served the British in the India-Burma theatre

Dalio's debt playbook: What Japan got wrong, and India may be getting right

In 'How Countries Go Broke', the billionaire investor offers a sweeping view of macro cycles and fiscal choices - arguing for 'beautiful deleveraging' as the best path through rising global risk

An early autopsy of capitalism: La Berge dissects the office machine

Set in the years just before the turn of the millennium, it recounts the time La Berge, now a writer and English professor, spent in the corporate world, helping a Fortune 500 company prepare for Y2K

Women see reversal of China's one-child policy as more state pressure

Instead of viewing it as encouragement to have more children, women see the modification in China's one-child policy as government pressure to reverse the declining birth rate

Iran's grieving mothers' ties have been a political force to reckon with

An interesting aspect of the rebellion in Iran is the power of mourning mothers. Since the 1980s, kinship among grieving mothers has been a driver of political engagement

A S Dulat's new book explores betrayal, belief and Farooq's Kashmir

He never considered independence for Kashmir, but Delhi still failed to trust him fully

Hubris Maximus: Pride, prejudices, and the nine lives of Elon Musk

How Elon Musk continues to emerge unscathed despite his most outrageous tweets and pronouncements

William Buckley Jr: The American right-wing's original influencer

As the Trump era dawned, many felt Buckley would have stopped it. He had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites-and perhaps even created the respectable right