BOOK REVIEWS


The market for self-help and productivity improvement books is evergreen; there is always a new technique, a new theory and a new ‘workbook’, to help you achieve more. Last fortnight, I reviewed Deep Work that explained the path to higher productivity especially for those who are doing...

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In late-2007, JK Rowling was trying to complete The Deathly Hallows, the last book in her Harry Potter series, as hundreds of millions of her young fans waited all over the world. But Rowling was not able to concentrate easily in her home office in Edinburgh (Scotland). “As I was finishing...

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Harsh Desai 07 December 2017
Once, when Indian test batsman VVS Laxman was asked about one of his great innings, he remarked “Oh it was nothing much. I just went out to the field and expressed myself.” Rajdeep Sardesai may well say that about this book. A self-confessed failed cricketer who could not rise beyond club...

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Most people do not know how to categorise Subramanain Swamy, teacher, economist, mathematician, an expert on China and an upright politician, in the habit of making ‘wild allegations’. Unlike most Indian leaders, he is highly educated. If he had continued in academics, he would have perhaps...

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About 40 pages into The Money Formula, by Paul Wilmott and David Orrell, you start wondering why would someone write another book on investments that forces us to read about all the characters and theories connected to the world of investing—from Isaac Newton (who lost money in the South Sea...

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Harsh Desai 26 October 2017
The precocious lawyer, Abhinav Chandrachud, has come out with his third book in four years and it is a timely treatise on the burning issue of free speech. The book is in two parts; the first deals with the evolution of Article 19 1(a) of the Constitution which guarantees the right of free...

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Western financial markets are often characterised by a colossal failure of supervision, every few years. Whether it is the Savings & Loans scam in the 1980s, the insider trading scandal of the late-1980s, the accounting scandal post dot-com bust in early-2000 or the bursting of the housing...

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There is a swathe of books on long-term investing. The most popular among these are about the value investing approach which remains rather undefined. One of the classical versions of the approach is to buy stocks available at a throwaway price (deep value investing). This has turned out to...

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It is raining books by bankers and former governors of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Quick on the heels of Duvvuri Subbarao’s book (Who Moved My Interest Rate. Leading the Reserve Bank through Five Turbulent Years), we have Yaga Venugopal Reddy’s Advice & Dissent: My Life In Public...

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Diet books that promise a slim waist and a long life are dime-a-dozen. But few things seem to be well-settled in nutritional science. For decades, dietary fat was the villain and suddenly now dietary fat is good. Dairy products were good, then bad and then good again. Sugar consumption has...

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In 1961, Edward Thorp, a young mathematician, flew into Washington, DC, to address a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at the Willard Hotel. The normal attendance at such meetings then used to be about 40-50 people. But, for this talk, there was a standing-room-only crowd of...

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Kate David Ricardo was one of the most influential of the classical British economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, James Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. But Ricardo, famous for theory of trade, labour theory of value, theory of comparative advantage, etc, has another identity. He...

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Sharika Dhar 23 June 2017
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics aims at transforming the current economic mindset which is obsessed with only one aspect of the subject: the GDP, to be more precise, growth.    GDP or gross domestic product is defined as the production of goods and services, within the boundaries of...

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Sharika Dhar 09 June 2017
“I did not share my memories of the bandage removal with Alice, but I did tell her that when I was in the hospital, I wanted to know the meaning of all the noises and beeps around me. I wanted to know my heart rate and blood pressure. I wanted to know the level of oxygen in my blood, the...

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Dr Nita Mukherjee 26 May 2017
For one who has written three biographies in the past decade, I have grappled with the acute shortage of source materials that provide evidence for not just the narrative of the life one is reconstructing but also the social and political issues of the times the person lived in. The book by...

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Influencing others to do something that you want them to do has been an art which only a few realise, focus their energies on, and manage to master. Apart from selling, marketing and advertising, this art is at the core of all human interactions such as interrogation, diplomacy, teaching,...

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For the patient do-it-yourself investor, High Returns from Low Risk by Pim Van Vliet is a breakthrough book, in the same league as The Little Book that Beats the Market. In that book, Joel Greenblatt explained how ranking stocks on the basis of high return on capital and low valuation does...

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Srinivas Hebbar 14 April 2017
Professor CNR Rao’s life has been a long and eventful one. He has produced research papers by the dozen, met the doyens in science from around the world, received the highest national awards, including the Bharat Ratna, and a clutch of foreign awards for science. Yet, Indian science has not...

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In the previous issue, I reviewed an interesting new book by Harvard University professor Bharat Anand, The Content Trap. His short point: great products do not guarantee success. It is the connections between users, between products and between different functions that ensure their...

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There are several books on the history of Indian Railways, and they are of two kinds—either academic, heavy-reads, or coffee table books with glossy pictures, peppered with some text. The book is easy to read, quick to finish and to the point, as the present generation wants; yet, it sums up...

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