A mixed bag – one that has something interesting for most readers – for September. And it’s a pretty eclectic selection too. With these books, you could learn to negotiate your way through life, read about some glorious old mansions that now stand abandoned, understand how bureaucracy in India works or witness secondhand goods travel the world in search of new owners. Or, for those with a penchant for the past, you could read about how the Commodore Amiga kickstarted the digital multimedia era and catch intriguing glimpses of how life used to be in the former Soviet Union. Ready to take the plunge? Here we go.
Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale Hardcover, by Adam Minter
‘Downsizing. Decluttering. Discarding. Sooner or later, all of us are faced with things we no longer need or want. But when we drop our old clothes and other items off at a local donation center, where do they go? Sometimes across the country – or even halfway across the world – to people and places who find value in what we leave behind. In Secondhand, journalist Adam Minter takes us on an unexpected adventure into the often-hidden, multibillion-dollar industry of reuse: thrift stores in the American Southwest to vintage shops in Tokyo, flea markets in Southeast Asia to used-goods enterprises in Ghana, and more. Along the way, Minter meets the fascinating people who handle – and profit from – our rising tide of discarded stuff, and asks a pressing question: In a world that craves shiny and new, is there room for it all? Secondhand offers hopeful answers and hard truths. A history of the stuff we’ve used and a contemplation of why we keep buying more, it also reveals the marketing practices, design failures, and racial prejudices that push used items into landfills instead of new homes. Secondhand shows us that it doesn’t have to be this way, and what really needs to change to build a sustainable future free of excess stuff,’ says the publisher’s note.
‘For an author with a partner or spouse, a book becomes a family project. My wife, Christine, was the first person to hear about my trips to cleanouts, to clothing markets, to the donation door [and] the experience impacted both of us. I was never much of a shopper in the first place, and I became less of one,’ the author says, who goes on to write about the global modern phenomenon of excessive consumption. The story of how people buy – and keep buying more, and more – stuff that they often don’t really need, and then once they realise the futility of storing stuff they may never use, how they desperately try to get rid of it. Old stuff is given away, donated to charities, sold through websites, auctioned or, sometimes, ‘gifted’ to other people, who in turn – more often than not – don’t even want it in the first place. It’s also given rise to a whole industry – the used goods marketplace for everything from old toys, secondhand books, used clothes, discarded home appliances, old furniture… you name it. This is the story of secondhand stuff that travels around the globe (or, in some cases, just around the block) and it’s quite fascinating. Highly recommended.
Secondhand, by Adam Minter
Format: Paperback / Kindle
Number of Pages: 320 / 317
Price: Rs 613 / Rs 279
Available on Amazon
Abandoned Palaces: Great Houses, Mansions, Estates and Hotels Suspended in Time, by Michael Kerrigan
‘Built to last, built to impress, built with style and grandeur – it is all the more remarkable when the most ostentatious of buildings fall into disrepair and become ruins. From imperial residences and aristocratic estates to hotels and urban mansions, Abandoned Palaces tells the stories behind dilapidated structures from all around the world. From ancient Roman villas to the French colonial hill station in Cambodia that was one of the final refuges of the Khmer Rouge, the book charts the fascinating decline of what were once the homes and holiday resorts of the wealthiest. Ranging from crumbling hotels in the Catskill Mountains or in Mozambique to grand mansions in Taiwan, and from an unfinished Elizabethan summerhouse to a modern megalomaniac’s estate too expensive ever to be completed, the reasons for the abandonment of these buildings include politics, bankruptcy, personal tragedies, natural and man-made disasters, as well as changing tastes and fashions. With 150 outstanding colour photographs exploring more than 100 hauntingly beautiful locations, Abandoned Palaces is a brilliant and moving pictorial examination of worlds we have left behind,’ says the publisher’s note.
‘The French poet Joachim du Bellay (1522-50) had some advice for classically-inspired contemporaries who, setting off in search of ancient Rome, were disappointed to find it nothing more than a ramshackle ruin. ‘These old palaces, these arches and these walls you see – these are what we call Rome. Rome itself is the sole monument of Rome,’ said du Bellay. There was no point, he insisted, in seeking some essential shrine that would reveal the eternal spirit of the eternal city – this was it. Much the same is true of less celebrated ruins in less august locations. Their dereliction in some sense defines them, delineates their connection with their own past; all that dirt and damage represents the wear and tear of history. There’s something especially poignant about a palatial ruin, whether that of an actual palace or of a prestigious hotel or townhouse. All masonry is not born equal: those buildings that have a higher status to start with do have further to fall than humbler houses, factories or office blocks,’ the author says. For those with a penchant for looking at and reading about old, abandoned structures that were once glorious – which often have deeply interesting stories intertwined with their existence – do yourself a favour and get a copy of this book.
Abandoned Palaces, by Michael Kerrigan
Format: Hardcover
Number of Pages: 224
Price: Rs 1,876
Available on Amazon
Everything Is Normal: The Life and Times of a Soviet Kid, by Sergey Grechishkin
‘Everything is Normal offers a lighthearted worm’s-eye-view of the USSR through the middle-class Soviet childhood of a nerdy boy in the 1970s and ’80s. A relatable journey into the world of the late-days Soviet Union, Everything is Normal is both a memoir and a social history; a reflection on the mundane deprivations and existential terrors of day-to-day life in Leningrad in the decades preceding the collapse of the USSR. Sergey Grechishkin’s world is strikingly different, largely unknown, and fascinatingly unusual, and yet a world that readers who grew up in the United States or Europe during the same period will partly recognize. This is a tale of friendship, school, and growing up – to read Everything is Normal is to discover the very foreign way of life behind the Iron Curtain, but also to journey back into a shared past,’ says the publisher’s note.
‘It was 1980, the start of a new decade – my first year with an 8 in front of it. It had been the ’80s for only eleven days but everything already felt somehow futuristic and space-agey. And in 20 years, it would be a brand-new century and I would be an old man, about to turn 29. Twenty years felt like an unfathomably long time. By then we would have built communism in the Soviet Union. At school, we were told that communism would be just like normal Soviet life, except everyone would be morally upstanding and diligent, and all the stores would be full of food, clothes and toys, free to anyone who needed them. We were told that every family would have a separate apartment to live in, with every person getting a room to themselves. I had also bet that in the year 2000 we would all go on vacations to outer space, maybe to Mars, but if not, then at least for sure to the moon. All of this seemed to be just over the horizon,’ the author says. For fascinating glimpses of life in the former Soviet Union, this book is hard to beat.
Everything Is Normal, by Sergey Grechishkin
Format: Paperback / Kindle
Number of Pages: 319 / 316
Price: Rs 2,496 / Rs 608
Available on Amazon
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
‘A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations. After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles – counterintuitive tactics and strategies – you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life. Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, re-negotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion,’ says the publisher’s note.
‘I’d come up to Harvard to take a short executive negotiating course, to see if I could learn something from the business world’s approach. For more than three decades, Harvard had been the world epicenter of negotiating theory and practice. All I knew about the techniques we used at the FBI was that they worked. In the twenty years I spent at the Bureau, we’d designed a system that successfully resolved almost every kidnapping we applied it to. We didn’t have grand theories – our techniques were the products of experiential learning; they were developed by agents in the field, negotiating through crisis and sharing stories of what succeeded and what failed. It was an iterative process, not an intellectual one, as we refined the tools we used day after day. And it was urgent. Our tools had to work, because if they didn’t, someone died. But why did they work? That was the question that drew me to Harvard. I needed to articulate my knowledge and learn how to combine it with theirs, so I could understand, systemize and expand it. As I’d soon discover in the storied halls of Harvard, our techniques made great sense intellectually and they worked everywhere. It turned out that our approach to negotiation held the keys to unlock profitable human interactions in every domain and every interaction and every relationship in life. This book is how it works,’ the author says.
Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
Format: Paperback / Kindle
Number of Pages: 288 / 293
Price: Rs 350 / Rs 250
Available on Amazon
The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, by Jimmy Maher
The book is about exploring the often-overlooked history and technological innovations of the world’s first true multimedia computer. ‘Long ago, in 1985, personal computers came in two general categories: the friendly game machine used for fun (exemplified by Atari and Commodore products); and the boring, beige adult box used for business (exemplified by products from IBM). The game machines became fascinating technical and artistic platforms that were of limited real-world utility. The IBM products were all utility, with little emphasis on aesthetics and no emphasis on fun. Into this bifurcated computing environment came the Commodore Amiga 1000. This personal computer featured a palette of 4,096 colors, unprecedented animation capabilities, four-channel stereo sound, the capacity to run multiple applications simultaneously, a graphical user interface, and powerful processing potential. It was, Jimmy Maher writes in The Future Was Here, the world’s first true multimedia personal computer,’ says the publisher’s note. Maher argues that the Amiga’s capacity to store and display color photographs, manipulate video (giving amateurs access to professional tools), and use recordings of real-world sound were the seeds of the digital media future: digital cameras, Photoshop, MP3 players, and even YouTube, Flickr, and the blogosphere. He examines different facets of the platform – from Deluxe Paint to AmigaOS to Cinemaware – in each chapter, creating a portrait of the platform and the communities of practice that surrounded it. Of course, Maher acknowledges, the Amiga was not perfect: the DOS component of the operating systems was clunky and ill-matched, for example, and crashes often accompanied multitasking attempts. And Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. But for a few years, the Amiga’s technical qualities were harnessed by engineers, programmers, artists, and others to push back boundaries and transform the culture of computing,’ it adds.
‘The platform series has been established to promote the investigation of underlying computing systems and how they enable, constrain, shape and support the creative work that is done on them. The series investigates the foundations of digital media – the computing systems, both hardware and software, that developers and users depend on for artistic, literary and gaming development,’ the author says. ‘Much of the Amiga’s history survives thanks to the efforts of the netizens who have archived software and even entire books and magazines that are now very difficult to find in their original forms. These digitized treasures from the past were key to much of my research. The current Amiga community is smaller than it once was, yet it remains a rather shockingly friendly and helpful bunch, something I relearned time and time again when drawing upon their experience and expertise in online resources such as the Amiga Addicts Sanctury,’ he adds. For those with fond memories of the Amiga days – or even for those with no memories of that era but with a curiosity to know more about the start of the digital multimedia era – this book will be a brilliant addition to your collection.
The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, by Jimmy Maher
Format: Paperback / Kindle
Number of Pages: 344 / 444
Price: Rs 2,393 / Rs 1,813
Available on Amazon
As Good as My Word: A Memoir, by K M Chandrasekhar
‘In an illustrious career spanning over forty years in public service and culminating in the highest office in Indian bureaucracy – Union Cabinet Secretary – K M Chandrasekhar has seen, and done, it all. He is one of those rare IAS officers who has held a wide range of senior positions in State government, the Centre, and public sector undertakings. In this autobiography, he paints an intimate picture of the UPA government during one of its toughest phases and his own, crucial, role in steering India through some of her most severe crises – the great recession of 2008, the oilmen’s strike in 2009 and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks – and scams – the 2G Spectrum case and the 2010 Commonwealth Games corruption scandal. This book describes Chandrasekhar’s experiments in public administration, cutting his teeth in trade diplomacy as the Indian ambassador to the World Trade Organization, his excellent working equation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, his run-ins with some prominent ministers of the time, and his reflections on Indian democracy, economy and defense. As Good as My Word is the story of the successes and failures of a civil servant, who successfully navigated challenging areas of public life. Unsparingly honest and forthright, and packed with political gossip, the book offers a ringside view of Indian politics and bureaucracy during the UPA era,’ says the publisher’s note.
‘I have often wondered why I became an IAS officer. As a child, I wanted to grow up to become an engine driver on railway trains. With my father working the Indian railways, there was nothing more majestic that I could visualize. Yet, I chose to join the civil services. Why? Largely because it was my father’s burning ambition to see his only child in the corridors of power. It is also a fact that in the 1960s and ’70s, opportunities were limited and government service seemed like the best option,’ the author says. ‘Have I regretted this choice? Was I railroaded into this career? I cannot say that I have never thought about the opportunities that I may have missed. But after all these years, I am happy the choice I made, even though it entailed sacrifice – choosing ideals over practical and monetary considerations. I live in a small flat because I cannot maintain a large house. Yet, the service has innumerable compensations. I am happy at the end of my career to have met several great people, made friends in Indian and abroad, and honed my skills and pitted them against the best in the world,’ he adds. It’s a great memoir, written will skill and verve, packed with great stories from a successful bureaucrat’s life. Well worth a read.
As Good as My Word: A Memoir, by K M Chandrasekhar
Format: Paperback / Kindle
Number of Pages: 312 / 385
Price: Rs 419 / Rs 335
Available on Amazon
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