Page 3 - Books

The Wisdom of Plagues: Book traces lessons not learned from pandemics

Covid-19 was the saddest pandemic NYT reporter Donald G McNeil ever covered. Now he shows how outbreaks like AIDS and Ebola foreshadowed the next in patterns, responses, and impact

Facing a 'reading crisis,' Denmark to make books cheaper by cutting tax

The Danish government announced this week that it planned to make books exempt from a 25 percent value-added tax

Meet the Savarnas: Ravikant Kisana's book on millennials and exclusion

For a society so deeply entrenched in caste and class, the cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Caste is ancient history one moment, yet dictates marriage or who works at your house the next

Inside India's polls: flaws, fraud, and the battle to save democracy

Author SY Quraishi dwells on the Model Code of Conduct and other aspects of holding elections, including the role of exit polls, media and hate speech

Can you make peace with your smartphone? Two books explore the idea

With this book, the author calcifies some of the deposits heavy phone use has left on her soul

India in Flux offers up new ways to think about complex challenges ahead

Few could have played the role Shankar Acharya did-navigating political, fiscal, and global pressures with clarity and conviction

A Billion Butterflies: This book drops truth bombs on climate change

How an old deal over a supercomputer explains the politics behind climate science today

Mehran Gul's debut book decodes the innovation ecosystem through its people

We see the United States as the source of just about all the technologies that define modern life, and most of the companies that created them are based there. But is that changing

The Johnson & Johnson Files: Unhealthy truths and defective hip implants

A tale of defective hip implants exposes India's weak medical oversight - and how multinationals treat Indian patients worse than those in rich countries

'Drugstore beetle' endangers 1,000-year-old library, 100,000 books

Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history. The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is a sprawling Benedictine monastery that is one of Hungary's oldest centres of learning and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Restoration workers are removing about 100,000 handbound books from their shelves and carefully placing them in crates, the start of a disinfection process that aims to kill the tiny beetles burrowed into them. The drugstore beetle, also known as the bread beetle, is often found among dried foodstuffs like grains, flour and spices. But they also are attracted to the gelatin and starch-based adhesives found in books. They have been found in a section of the library housing around a quarter of the abbey's 400,000 volumes. This is an advanced insect infestation which has been detected in several parts of the library, so the en

Tribals and the Hindutva framework: New book explores RSS's evolving views

From Sarna to Ghar Wapsi, this book breaks new ground on the evolution of RSS's thinking on tribals and complex questions such as their treatment after conversion to Christianity

Kulpreet Yadav's Dial 100: A taut true crime ode to India's overworked cops

Crime is never pleasant to read about or watch - let alone experience. But true stories remind us to stay alert and recognise the warning signs of danger

The New Age of Sexism: Laura Bates' latest book exposes online misogyny

Feminist activist Laura Bates turns her investigative lens on the insidious spread of online misogyny - now assuming new virtual avatars, yet still rooted in age-old patriarchal violence

Proto: Laura Spinney's new book explores the journey of global PIE

Beyond the hypotheses of origin and its subsequent demise and immortalisation, there is a huge world of learning for anyone looking to understand the evolution of languages and even, humankind

Frederick Forsyth, author of book 'Day of the Jackal', passes away at 86

Frederick Forsyth, the British author of The Day of the Jackal" and other bestselling thrillers, has died after a brief illness, his literary agent said Monday. He was 86. Jonathan Lloyd, his agent, said Forsyth died at home early Monday surrounded by his family. We mourn the passing of one of the world's greatest thriller writers," Lloyd said. Born in Kent, in southern England, in 1938, Forsyth served as a Royal Air Force pilot before becoming a foreign correspondent. He covered the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, which provided inspiration for The Day of the Jackal, his bestselling political thriller about a professional assassin. Published in 1971, the book propelled him into global fame. It was made into a film in 1973 starring Edward Fox as the Jackal and more recently a television series starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. In 2015, Forsyth told the BBC that he had also worked for the British intelligence agency MI6 for many years

This American Woman: Aunti Zarna takes the mic and the spotlight

As one sifts through pages of this breezy memoir full of interesting anecdotes and life lessons, two subliminally influential experiences that helped shape Garg's life before her marriage can be noted

Harvard's 'cheap' Magna Carta turns out to be rare 1300 royal edition

After the 1215 original printed by King John, five other editions were written in the following decades - until 1300, the last time the full document was set out and authorised by the king's seal

On Failing: Where the quiet complexities of failure take centre stage

Through an eclectic collection of essays spanning subjects from suicide to physiology, On Failing creates space for failure to exist-without forcing life lessons down anyone's throat

Indian policing and the legacy of violence: A call for urgent reform

Has the dehumanisation of the police worsened their violence? Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta explore this through political and sociological lenses, calling for urgent reform

Poonam Agarwal's book 'India Inked' decodes India's electoral practices

Poonam Agarwal offers an excellent account of the supposedly politics-agnostic electoral bonds for anyone wanting to understand how a part of India's election system works - and how it is undermined