Nada Bakos’ book The Targeter was a greatly publicised one before its release earlier this year. A good one with information about CIA’s efforts at Langley as well as in Baghdad to track down and neutralise one of the world’s most wanted AQ terrorists and in a way the father of ISIS by name Abu […]
Koenraad Elst never disappoints. This book is no exception. You may agree or disagree with his views and conclusions, but you cannot but read him. Like his other works starting from the 90’s writings on Ayodhya, this book too is rich in content and engrossing in arguments. Koenraad has a style that is both provocative […]
I introduced the first volume of Those Eighteen Days earlier. The second volume is also no less significant and rich in content and narrative. Dr Narayanacharya takes us through the part of the War that became Adharmic and drifted into an absolute horror. All rules of the game change and Sri Krishna takes pains to […]
Read several books on Mossad, the omnipotent Israeli intelligence service. But this one, ‘Rise and Kill First’ by journalist Ronen Bergman is markedly different. It doesn’t romanticise, nor does it portray the agency as superhuman and invincible. It instead presents a very realistic, almost day-to-day account of Mossad and its sister agencies in Israel. It […]
Excellent narration of the details of the 18-day Mahabharata War. Dr. Narayanacharyulu, an eminent Vedic scholar from Karnataka and a Doctorate in Modern English Literature renders it in a gripping conversational style providing details as though it were an eyewitness account. Of particular significance in the first volume are the chapters dealing with Bhishma’s dilemmas […]
Interesting book passionately arguing for the US to reacquire ‘tragic sensibility’, meaning, it should be ready to lead the struggles for maintaining a peaceful, liberal and democratic international order irrespective of the costs involved. In his inaugural address John F Kennady made a commitment that his generation of Americans, “tempered by war, disciplined by a […]
Just completed this interesting book. Interesting because in a sophisticated manner it tries to suggest that once-a-holy-idea of democracy is no longer a truthful institution and post-truth influence is what drives global democratic politics today. This book is actually about the nervousness of the liberal intelligentsia over the prospects of democracies that they believed would […]
Farah Pandit’s ‘How We Win’ is undoubtedly the best book I have read on the theme of Violent Extremism (as she wishes to call it) sweeping across not only the Muslim lands but the entire world. I have many reasons for my admiration for the book and its author, her being of Indian origin – […]
A very interesting book to read. ‘The 48 Laws of Power’. Some of the suggested laws are so much intriguing that one feels that they are against the Indian ethos. But then, these laws are not for common people, they are for leaders who want power. Although written from a Western or European perspective of […]
Interesting book by a diplomat-turned-politician, Minister in GoI Hardeep Singh Puri about the idiosyncratic decisions of leaders of countries like US, UK and India and how they affected domestic and global governance. Of particular interest could be chapters on Trump, Brexit and global governance. *** Edit job of Penguin Viking was below standard though
