Sunday, September 7, 2003		Books

Off the shelf
The rise and fall of Ayub Khan
V. N. Datta
LEOPOLD van Ranke, who laid the foundation of German historiography in the 19th century, had recognised the importance of primary source material in the reconstruction of the foreign policy of a country. He greatly valued the reports of the diplomats for the internal history of the countries in which these personages resided. By using the dispatches of Prussian ambassadors in England, he produced an illuminating story of the domestic situation during the Stuarts reign.

Bestsellers

Signs and signatures
An American poet’s passage to Punjab
Darshan Singh Maini
THE great American poet, Walt Whitman, never visited Punjab or, for that matter, even India, though his celebrated poem, Passage to India has received a lot of insightful criticism both in India and in the USA. Indeed, India figures as a grand metaphor in his poetry, and it appears this distant land of the Vedas and fabulous riches of the spirit had, as in the writings of other Transcendentalist writers, become a land of the imagination where the human soul in search of nirvanaor arrival offered endless vistas of infinity.

The company that Jack Welch built
Lalit Mohan
The GE Way Fieldbook
by Robert Slater. Tata McGraw-Hill. Pages 288. Rs 250.
A field book on any subject would normally hold interest for professionals engaged in that particular activity. But when such a book describes how a legendary business manager converted a $-25-billion company with $-1.5-billion profits into a $-123-billion giant, generating a $-10-billion bottomline, many would take notice.

JP and the Emergency
R. L. Singal
In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency
by Bipan Chandra. Penguin Books India, New Delhi. Pages 374. Rs 350.
THE book under review spells out the author’s own assessment of JP’s character and motivation of the movement launched by him, and the causes of the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975 by Indira Gandhi. Both steps, according to the learned author, were taken in the name of democracy. Though the actions of both countered their proclaimed purposes.

Fighting a monolith called corruption
Jai Narain Sharma
Corruption in India
by N. Vittal. Academic Foundation, New Delhi. Pages 186. Rs. 175
CORRUPTION in India is a phenomenon that one has to face virtually in every sphere of life. Transparency International, a Berlin-based NGO, publishes every year a "corruption perception index," ranking countries from the least corrupt to the most corrupt. India ranks 73rd out of the 102 countries listed for the year 2002.