Life is elsewhere
Rumina Sethi
Satyr of the Subway: Urban Tales.
Anita Nair, Penguin, New Delhi.
Pages 162. Rs. 200.
A startling and bold book, perhaps even shocking. More and more, writers of short story are becoming adept at the art of scandalous writing. The bomb has to drop within the span of a few, short pages; the reader’s senses have to be captured immediately.

Frozen passion of love and faith
A.J. Philip
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber Pages 436, Rs 276
THERE is no better companion than a book during a long train journey. I would not have bought Orhan Pamuk's Snow but for the fact that he won this year's Nobel for literature. In the end, it turned out to be an engrossing book taking away the journey’s tediousness. The Nobel-worthiness is manifest in the narration, the treatment of the subject, the development of characters and the denouement.

Guru’s bequest
Roopinder Singh
Guru Arjan Dev: Life, Martyrdom and Legacy
ed: Prithipal Singh Kapur, Mohinder Singh
Delhi Sikh Gurdwara
Management Committee, New Delhi. Pages 196.
Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Guru of the Sikhs, built the Harmandir Sahib, in Amritsar, where he had the first Sikh holy book, the Adi Granth, compiled and installed. He was the first Guru to be martyred.

"The 1857 Uprising wasn’t a coherent political war of independence"
Author and historian William Dalrymple spent four years in dusty archives to study hitherto unquoted 20,000 "rebel documents" to construct his new book, The Last Mughal: The Eclipse of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. The horrific story of the rebellion of 1857 against the British and how it resulted in the fall of Mughal Delhi.

How easy to dispose of the poor
Arun Gaur
Yamuna Gently Weeps: A Journey into the Yamuna Pushta Slum Demolitions
by Ruzbeh N. Bharucha.
Sainathann Communication, New Delhi.
Pages 296. Rs 700.
May 9, 2004—one day before the Lok Sabha general elections. Houses of 1,50,000 poor men, women, and children, residing at the Yamuna Pushta slum of Delhi for almost 40 years, were bulldozed and razed to the ground. Nothing remained.

Assembly of warring nations
D.S. Cheema
The WTO: A Discordant Orchestra
by T.K. Bhaumik. Sage, New Delhi. Pages 248. Rs 320
So much has been written on this one of the most powerful yet controversial multilateral institutions of the world, that any reader would like to read a book on the WTO only if it throws a fresh light on the problems it faces and suggests any practical solutions to enhance its relevance to all member countries. The author has attempted just that in this book, which provides an incisive account, right from the birth of the WTO to the recently stalled Doha Negotiations.

Scrutinising the media
Kanwalpreet
Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues
eds Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma. Sage, New Delhi. Pages 406. Rs 420.
The media is supposed to report the happenings in society and transmit an impartial picture to the people. But sometimes the media takes over the role of reporting, scrutinising and deciding the events by giving its opinion about the role of the people involved.

Looking ahead and within
India: The Next decade
Ed Manmohan Malhoutra
Academic Foundation in association with Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust
Pages 570. Rs 1295
NO other democracy, it is said, has achieved levels of sustained economic growth comparable to India’s over the last two decades. What happens to the largest democracy is bound to impact the world at large. The book comprises the papers and discussions presented in the 2004 Indira Gandhi Conference that chose to focus specifically on India in the coming decade, through the prism of politics, economy, culture and the external world.

Kundera’s homecoming
Czech writer Milan Kundera’s most famous novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being has become a best seller in his homeland after a 20-year wait for its general release in his native language.

Back of the book
A Roman Ransom
by Rosemary Rowe
Headline. Pages 337. £ 32.99
AD 188. When Marcus Septimus’s wife 188. When Marcus Septimus’s wife and son are kidnapped, he turns to Libertus for help. A ransom demand has arrived. Unless Marcus uses his position as senior magistrate to release a prisoner, he will never see his family alive again.

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