| Two of the most interesting business books of the year came from Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Wall Street trader and thinker. Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence begins with an account of the backroom effort to ensure that America's markets didn't crash in the wake of 9/11 and continued with a surprisingly personal take on the global capitalist economy. |
| Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable explains why the most important events that will shape the world are rare creatures "" "black swans", to use his parlance. But the book that got the attention of boardroom India was Kishore Biyani's easy-to-read, articulate It Happened in India. Anyone with an interest in India's retail markets grabbed a copy. |
| Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy drew many admirers and a few dissenting voices, but this marathon and thorough history of the first 60 years after Independence is likely to remain a reference-shelf classic. Writing about the Mahatma himself has spawned a virtual cottage industry, but a welcome addition to those groaning bookshelves is Rajmohan Gandhi's Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, the People and an Empire "" Gandhi's grandson has a distinctly personal take to offer. |
| Backtracking to the colonial era, Charles Allen's Kipling Sahib was a delightful and illuminating exploration of Rudyard Kipling's Indian years and writings "" Allen's thesis is, in part, that Kipling's best writings came from India and that he dwindled as a writer when he returned to England. On a completely different tack, Kumar Prasad Mukherji's The Lost World of Hindustani Music was a revelation, combining a sense of history with an anecdotal flair that brings that vanished world to life. |
| Many of the books that came out this year took a look at the art of war, 21st century style. Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone should be read alongside Herodotus and Michael Herr just to get a sense of how deeply today's First World warriors depend on insulation, on being cut off from the enemy that they fight and will never really understand. Who is the enemy, anyway? Ishmael Beah offered a perspective with the gripping and often heartwrenching A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, his account of life as a 12-year-old combatant in Sierra Leone's civil war. |
| Two other memoirs, both by women, were especially haunting. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel set off a storm of controversy as the young Somalian described growing up in a world where poverty was a given, and her subsequent struggles to break away from the local Islamic culture she called "brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women". Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying is a lyrical, moving memoir of her father and her uncle. One brother left Haiti and built a life in the US, the other stayed on as a witness to his country's history, applying to the US only for temporary asylum. He was denied both asylum and treatment for a medical condition: he died in a nebulous zone between the world he knew and the world his brother inhabited. |
| It isn't possible to list all the books I'd like to, but this column would be incomplete without mentioning Hermione Lee's superb biography of Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence, House of Mirth). Edith Wharton recasts the novelist as a strong-willed woman born in the wrong day and age, struggling to escape the society she captured so well on paper. And no self-respecting bookshelf would be complete without The Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid). Hughes, who was often and perhaps unfairly accused of driving his poet wife Sylvia Plath to suicide, saw letter writing as "excellent training for conversation with the world". His letters reveal a man who is reticent, but also searingly honest: "Sylvia killed herself Monday morning. No doubt where the blame lies." (Disclaimer: The columnist is chief editor, Westland and EastWest Books. The views expressed here are personal.) |
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