In his latest book titled The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan, former US Marine and best-selling author Elliot Ackerman offers a ringside view of the war. Elliot Ackerman had left the US military for over 10 years when he was sucked into the chaos that ensued following last year’s withdrawal of American troops from … Continue reading Author and former Marine Elliot Ackerman on the 20-year American war in Afghanistan
Books
A Cold War State of Mind and Weird Neurosurgeries
Brandy Schillace opens the lid on the race between the West and the Soviets to dominate the world through brain science Brandy Schillace Any writer less talented than Brandy Schillace would have made this book – a grand medley of biography, history, medicine, ethics, geopolitics and Cold War – monotonous and dreadful. It is wacky … Continue reading A Cold War State of Mind and Weird Neurosurgeries
How a Few Smart Men Mined and Manipulated Data to Con the World
Book: Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World Author: Christopher Wylie Publisher: Profile Books 269 pages | Rs 599 Two sentences from its pages capture the spirit of this book by the man who is often called ‘the first great whistleblower from the millennials’s generation’. Here goes one of them: ‘Inside Cambridge Analytica, … Continue reading How a Few Smart Men Mined and Manipulated Data to Con the World
Nayanjot Lahiri: The Time Keeper
FOR THE SERIOUS academic historian that she is, Nayanjot Lahiri, author of works as stellar as Ashoka in Ancient India and Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered, has reason to contend, perhaps with a slight sense of guilt, that her latest work is a “light-hearted” one. Or perhaps more than guilt, it could be her … Continue reading Nayanjot Lahiri: The Time Keeper
Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics (Penguin Viking)
A sleepy coastal district in the scenic south Indian state of Kerala, Kannur has metamorphosed into a hotbed of political violence in the past few decades. Even as India heaves into the age of technology and economic growth, the town has been making it to the national news for brutal murders with sickening regularity. What … Continue reading Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics (Penguin Viking)
A Lit Fest on Palace Grounds Gives Thiruvananthapuram a New Cultural Elan
OVER THE PAST many decades, Thiruvananthapuram has earned a name for playing the perfect host to film festivals that invariably attract crowds from across the state, from as far as Kerala’s northernmost district, and even from metros across the world. South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk is a household name in this part of the country. … Continue reading A Lit Fest on Palace Grounds Gives Thiruvananthapuram a New Cultural Elan
Tariq Ali Resurrects Lenin from the Distortions of History (Book Review)
The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution | Tariq Ali | Verso | 384 Pages | Rs 1,750 SOVIET-ERA PUBLICATIONS have for long offered us a highly truncated picture of Vladimir Lenin. Besides those endless hagiographies, I remember reading one book that was slightly different for the age before the fall of the … Continue reading Tariq Ali Resurrects Lenin from the Distortions of History (Book Review)
Book review: The Undoing Project
The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World | Michael Lewis | Allen Lane | 362 Pages | Rs 799 MAN IS A RATIONAL animal. At least that is what we all learnt in school. It sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. How wrong that was. We did unlearn, over … Continue reading Book review: The Undoing Project
The Making of ‘The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox’
Atal Bihari Vajpayee was born on the day Mahatma Gandhi was elected the Congress president for the first and the last time on December 25, 1924. But unlike most of his peers, the young Atal didn't think highly of the man who made a movement out of the Congress, which, before he took the helm … Continue reading The Making of ‘The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox’
The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox (Penguin Viking)
Publisher: Penguin Viking Release date: 25 December 2016 Buy the book on Amazon. (It is also available in Hindi and Marathi). Despite his grand ‘secular’ statements in Parliament that bordered on the Nehruvian, Atal Bihari Vajpayee has often taken brief excursions into the hardline camp. In 1983, he made an incendiary speech during the Assam elections in which the … Continue reading The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox (Penguin Viking)
Ullekh NP 