Truth, torture, Trump and more: James Comey's eventful career
IANS Rating
User Rating
This is Comey's memoir with the parts on Clinton and Trump the highlights, but the good lawyer he is, he builds up to them, showing why he acted the way he did by detailing his formative influences and his career.
Exploring the heart of matter - and why atoms are important
IANS Rating
User Rating
Why the atom is so important is what science journalist and space historian Piers Bizony tells us in this installment of the Icon Science series recounting the significance of key moment in science over the last few centuries.
Exploring the heart of matter - and why atoms are important
IANS Rating
User Rating
Why the atom is so important is what science journalist and space historian Piers Bizony tells us in this installment of the Icon Science series recounting the significance of key moment in science over the last few centuries.
The French novelist who fought for justice - and the price he paid
IANS Rating
User Rating
The French Revolution brought the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity into modern political discourse, but the Dreyfus scandal of the 1890s raised the question whether these had permeated into their homeland. As this book tells us, the case exposed faultlines between France's monarchist, religious and anti-Semitic right and the liberal, republican, and (later) socialist sections -- a rift which would haunt the country in the coming century and cripple it in the face of aggression.
The 'home' of capitalism and the renovations it needs
IANS Rating
User Rating
American financial journalist William D. Cohan leans largely towards the first as he seeks to make a case for Wall Street's importance to the world we have become used to. Many of today's innovations, from swanky mobile phones to credit cards to pension plans, he contends in this book, owe their genesis to it.
Solving a murder in a Nazi bastion, escaping the Stasi
IANS Rating
User Rating
This entails going over to Britain and poisoning -- by thallium no less -- a covert woman agent, whom Gunther had deftly outsmarted in his previous outing ("The Other Side of Silence", 2016). And just to keep him on his toes, Mielke has his men arrange a near-fatal hanging for him.
Romantic repetitions: Love re-ignited and its redemptive course
IANS Rating
User Rating
As the story opens in Mumbai in December 2015, it's been just a year or so that Maya Arya nee Sharma has divorced from her philandering husband after catching him in flagrante delicto in his office -- when he thoughtlessly left the door unlocked.
Love's different shades -- and their tryst with 'normal' life
IANS Rating
User Rating
Can love survive the pressures of modern living and of careers, the changes in personality, the role of families, incorporate existing friendships or deal with myriad, mostly sordid things that are an inescapable part of life in the "happily ever after" phase? Or does it get replaced by something akin to an automatic acceptance of muddling through after the initial excitement and passion dissipates?
The other Pakistan: People beyond media and popular perceptions
IANS Rating
User Rating
There are stories of a country beyond this -- of uncommonly common people, or nameless victims of regressive and violent patriarchy or social and religious pressure, but also of hopes, aspirations and love, of crimes, oppression and betrayal, and more. And then there is the curious love-hate relationship with its bigger, eastern neighbour.
The perils of negotiating with defectors -- and surviving
IANS Rating
User Rating
While there are no definite answers to these questions or even a standard pattern of responses, the very fact of asking them can embroil those curious in what legendary (and by some accounts, cracked) American spy-catcher James Jesus Angleton called the "wilderness of mirrors" where the truth can be -- and frequently is -- distorted, elusive and lethal.
