Published by Vintage / Crown, 2012, 414 pages. Published in the US as The Black Count—Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo We know Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, as a work of fiction. But he based a lot of it on the life of his father, also Alexandre …
Category: Current Affairs / Politics / Society / History
Swiss Watching—Inside the Land of Milk and Money: Diccon Bewes
Published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2018, 352 pages. What does Switzerland mean to most people? Cows, chocolate, banking, cheese and mountains—these were some of the responses Diccon Bewes got when he put the question to 100 non-Swiss people. Yes, Switzerland is all these things but there is so much more to this country. In his …
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My Secret Brexit Diary—A Glorious Illusion: Michel Barnier
Translated from French by Robin MackayPublished by Polity Press, 2021, 450 pages. Original version published in 2021. In a nation-wide referendum on 23 June 2016, the British voted, by a slim majority, to leave the European Union. The process of leaving the EU was long-drawn-out and complicated. Like many people outside the UK, I developed …
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The Favored Daughter—One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future: Fawzia Koofi with Nadene Ghouri
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 272 pages. “On the day I wrote the letter [that became chapter 1 in this book] I was warned not to travel because there had been a credible threat that the Taliban planned to kill me by planting an improvised explosive device (a roadside bomb) underneath my car. The Taliban …
Feminine Ingenuity—How Women Inventors Changed America: Anne L. Macdonald
Published by Ballantine Books, 1992, 415 pages. “Although women have invented since the beginning of time, it seems as if full recognition of their role has been painfully slow.” When you think of inventors, who do you think of? Usually it is men like Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers and Giovanni Marconi. Seeing that women …
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The Powerful and the Damned—Private Diaries in Turbulent Times: Lionel Barber
Published by WH Allen, 2020, 480 pages. From 2005 to 2020, Lionel Barber had what he called “the best job in the world”: editor of the London Financial Times. This is Barber’s account of those years and his close encounters with the great and the not-so-great (or good!). As editor of a major newspaper, Barber …
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The Good Girls—An Ordinary Killing: Sonia Faleiro
Published by Bloomsbury Circus, 2021, 352 pages. Sonia Faleiro’s new book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, investigates the death of two young girls in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh. The book offers Faleiro, an accomplished journalist, an opportunity to spend four years following up on a hot-button news story. It lets her, and her readers, to look …
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The Anarchy—The Relentless Rise of the East India Company: William Dalrymple
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 576 pages. William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire is a chronicle of greed, ambition, and the machinations that put a vast geographical territory under the East India Company (EIC). The book’s epigraph offers a succinct summary of the book’s central theme: “Corporations …
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We are Displaced—My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World: Malala Yousafzai (with Liz Welch)
Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019, 224 pages.Review by Mohan Raj A longer version of this review was originally published in The Book Review, Vol XLIV, No. 2-3, Feb-Mar 2020. Reproduced with the permission of The Book Review Literary Trust. Displacement──within and across countries──of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is …
Taken at the Flood—A Memoir of a Political Life: Vasanth Kannabiran
Published by Women Unlimited, 2019, 250 pages.Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian Originally published in The Book Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 8, August 2020. Reprinted with permission from The Book Review Literary Trust. Vasanth Kannabiran’s latest book, described in this edition’s back cover as "a feminist memoir", is a great deal more. There are at least three …
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