Category: Reviews
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Book Review: Journeys Across India
Born in 1854 in the district of Nadia, in West Bengal, Durgacharan Rakshit was a scholar and a business owner who, in the late-1800s and early-1900s, set out to travel across India. This, he did on foot and by boat, train and horse-drawn carriage – practically whatever means of transport was available at any given…
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Book Review: Tightwads and Spendthrifts
What most of humanity can agree upon, without too much debate, is that most of us quite like having money. As much of it, in fact, as possible and then some more. But spending all that money can be the tricky part. The tightwads amongst us are inclined to be extra careful with handing out…
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Book Review: Never Out of Print – The Rupa Story
One of India’s oldest, most prominent publishing houses, Rupa was established in Calcutta back in 1936 by Daudayal Mehra, then a young man who saw an opportunity in the bookselling business. Today, even as all major, global publishers have entered the Indian market over the last few decades, Rupa continues to thrive as an independent…
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Book Review: An Inky Parade
Author, avid bibliophile and book collector Pradeep Sebastian’s new book, An Inky Parade ‘is a window into the charming world of antiquarian book trade in India and around the world, as well as an ode to the book as an object of art, sure to delight every reader,’ says the publisher’s note. ‘Blending personal experience,…
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Book Review: The Pursuit of Reputation
Let’s start with an honest admission. While I’ve worked as a journalist for most of the last 25-30 years, I have also worked in Public Relations and Corporate Communications for a few years. With a German car manufacturer, in Formula 1, with India’s only F1 and MotoGP circuit, and with a leading agency that’s headquartered…
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Book Review: Shelf Aware – A Love Affair with Books
A deep and enduring love of books is a unique affliction – happily embraced and nurtured by those who have the condition, little understood and airily dismissed by those who don’t. Based in California, in the US, VR Ferose certainly belongs in the former category. A technocrat, Ferose is Head of SAP Engineering Academy in…
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Book Review: Adman Madman – Unapologetically Prahlad
One look at the mildly risqué back cover of this book and you know this isn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill memoir. For there is an exuberant Prahlad Kakar, bearded and long-haired, with an impressively long cigar in his mouth, holding up a large fish (which he has presumably just caught) in one hand and…
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Book Review: Indian Christmas
Edited by Madhulika Liddle and Jerry Pinto, Indian Christmas is an anthology of essays, poems and hymns that showcase the variety of ways in which Christmas is celebrated across India. This isn’t a new book – Indian Christmas was published more than a year ago – but BooksFirst.in didn’t exist back then. And now, since…
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Book Review: Forgotten Foods
Edited by Tarana Husain Khan, Claire Chambers and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia is a delectable anthology of essays where the authors write about food – the food they remember enjoying as children, the food of their community, the food that reminds them of home. And, yes, it’s important…
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Book Review: The Geek Way
Who, exactly, is a ‘geek’? ‘The word geek is a term originally used to describe eccentric people. In current use, the word typically connotes an expert or enthusiast obsessed with a hobby or intellectual pursuit,’ says Wikipedia. And so, of course, you have car geeks, computer geeks, math geeks, book geeks and a thousand others…