Book Review - Let Trump Be Trump by Corey Lewandowski

President Trump’s path to the White House was paved with fast food, conflicting egos and foul-mouthed rants, according to a new book by two former top aides.

The three-ring circus that was the Trump campaign is detailed in “Let Trump Be Trump,” which hits stores on Tuesday. 

In its pages, ousted campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, another top staffer, reveal juicy tidbits, according to The Washington Post, which got an advance copy of the tome.

Trump’s love of fast food, specifically McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, is well documented. His standing, gut-busting order at the Golden Arches is “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted,” the book claims.

The soon-to-be leader of the free world also threw curse-laden tantrums which included people getting their “face ripped off.” Lewandowski writes.

Disgraced former campaign chairman Paul Manafort may have come close to that, according to one anecdote.

Candidate Trump allegedly flew into a rage on a helicopter, ordering the pilot to drop to lower altitude so he could call Manafort and give him a tongue lashing. 

“Did you say I shouldn’t be on TV on Sunday? I’ll go on TV anytime I g--damn f---ing want and you won’t say another f---ing word about me!” Trump hollered, according to Lewandowski.

The novelty of working on “Making America Great Again” wore off for some beleaguered underlings. “Sooner or later, everybody who works for Donald Trump will see a side of him that makes you wonder why you took a job with him in the first place,” the writers explain.

Also chronicled are the moments after press secretary Hope Hicks got the Oct. 7, 2016 call from a reporter asking about the infamous “Access Hollywood” interview.

Trump read a transcript of the “grab them by the p---y” clip and said, “That doesn’t sound like something I would say,” the book claims, and the campaign hastily decided to brand the banter “locker room talk.”

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Original review on: http://www.nydailynews.com

Book Review - The Bengalis A Portrait of a Community by Sudeep Chakravarti

“But Gandhi arrived in Bengal, when so many others in India would not….There is no exact record of how many people died in Noakhali and in adjoining Tipperah district from October 1946.

Estimates range from 500 (Muslim League sources) to 50,000 (other sources)…..Even before he reached Noakhali, on his way from Kolkata, Gandhi was emotionally battered. 

The fires of Kolkata had spread to Noakhali and then on to Bihar…..Gandhi sensed it was as bad as it could get.”

“Is counter-communalism any answer to the communalism of which Congressmen have accused the Muslim League?” he asked of his colleagues. “Is it Nationalism to seek barbarously to crush 14 per cent of the Muslims in Bihar?”

While capturing some of those most poignant and dramatic days when Mahatma Gandhi was in Bengal to quell the ‘communal madness’ in the wake of the pre-partition riots, writer-author Sudeep Chakravarti, who had served in senior journalistic positions earlier, in this latest work, ‘The Bengalis – A Portrait of a Community’, was far from touching a raw nerve. 

The cycle of violence then until “finally cooled to embers”, was the culmination of a wider socio-historical process of which the community he has chronicled in this work played a big role.

Combining the nonchalance of a professional scribe with empathies for the suffering masses as someone who has also seen some of these ‘Bangla stories’ from within since his younger days, Sudeep Chakravarti dwells deep into various facets of what has gone to make up the Bengali identity over the recent centuries, not just through a nostalgic lens, but has been equally critical of Bengal society.

For the author, Gandhi may have been the ‘Brief Bengali’ as he puts it in the section from where the above quoted passage appears. Gandhi was at the receiving end of much criticism in Bengal, the land of the fiery patriot Subhas Chandra Bose.

After all, the modern Indian Renaissance, substantially a Kolkata-centric Bengal Renaissance had produced such dazzling array of figures from social reformers like Raja Ramohun Roy, the universalistic and austerely cosmopolitan Brahmo Samaj he had inspired, Ishwara Chandra Vidyasagar, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, defiant contrarians  like Chittaranjan Das, M.N. Roy and Rash Behari Bose, genius of a physicist in Satyend-ranath Bose who was compared to Einstein, three Nobel Laureates so far – Tagore, Amartya Sen for Economics and Mohammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank microfinance fame in Bangladesh that has played a big part in women’s empowerment, to Satyajit Ray in film making,- it is said even C V Raman doing all his pioneering work in Kolkata made a big difference than if had got stuck in old Madras.

The list is a heady mix of variety and excellence to grab the crown of chauvinism. But Sudeep has commendably taken the ‘Bengalis’ story right up to Mamata Didi, to a higher, historically self-critical level, blending scholarship with lucid style, in drawing the big picture of a vibrant, linguistically bonded culture of romanticists, football lovers, foodies and travel adventurists.  

As the author says, “Gandhi was also breathtaking. This was a man from Gujarat, by way of South Africa,…charioteering of India’s collective nationalism…..At one stage, Gandhi had even said he had “become a Bengali for all intents and purposes.” 

Sudeep Chakravarti goes on to add: “I would put my neck on the line and say this Gujarati, who claimed for some weeks to be Bengali, whom many Bengalis still love to hate for his dislike of Subhas Bose-, did more for Bengal and Bengalis in those darkest months in 1946, than did millions of Bengalis who let their leaders mix rationale with religion.” …”50 years later, I went looking for Gandhi, that Brief Bengali, amid the detritus of history, to understand better his presence,” confides the author.

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Original review on: http://www.deccanchronicle.com

Book Review - THE BIG BOOK OF THE CONTINENTAL OP by Dashiell Hammett

Have I got a treat for those who prefer to celebrate their holidays in hard-boiled, rather than Hallmark, style. It’s a heavyweight of a collection called “The Big Book of The Continental Op” that gathers together the 28 short stories, two novels and one unfinished tale starring Dashiell Hammett’s first series detective, known only as “The Continental Op.”

For those readers who haven’t yet run into him, the Op is middle-aged, overweight and nameless. His moniker derives from his job: He’s an “operative” or detective, who works for the Continental Detective Agency. 

He’s easy to underestimate, but that would be a mistake. In the Op, Hammett revolutionized the traditional figure of the detective, strong-arming him out of his Sherlockian smoking jacket and into an American-made trench coat, shoving him out of his armchair and down those dark alleys where the most realistic crimes are waiting to be solved. 

Hammett paid tribute to his first great literary creation by referring to him as “a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit.”

Hammett wrote The Continental Op stories in the earliest years of his career, and to read them in sequence is to witness how Hammett slowly transformed the formulaic “gals, guts, and guns” action tales, the staple of pulp magazines like the Black Mask, into the stuff of literature. 

Even the early Op stories here give readers the chance to walk around the mythic San Francisco that Hammett created — a place of fog and furnished apartments, sinister Nob Hill mansions and Chinatown gambling dens.

This collection is edited by the distinguished Hammett scholar Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett, who is Hammett’s granddaughter. In a couple of short-but-substantive opening essays, Layman sketches out the sources of the Continental Op stories in Hammett’s own five-year career working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. 

That career was interrupted by his Army service in World War I, where he contracted tuberculosis. In 1922, Hammett (by then on disability and a married father of a young daughter) took a course at the Munson School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper writing objective.” 

Layman suggests that journalistic training came in handy when Hammett began submitting stories to the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1923.

Those early stories were published under the editorial reign of George W. Sutton, a busy guy who wrote about cars and boats on the side. 

There’s little to suggest that either Sutton or Hammett realized that the popular Op stories were also remaking the detective fiction form. The first Op story, “Arson Plus,” is dated Oct. 1, 1923, and Hammett wrote it under the pseudonym, Peter Collinson, theater slang for “a phantom person.” 

The plots of “Arson Plus” and the other Sutton-era stories are simple and their pilferings from the more genteel British mystery tradition evident. For example, in “Slippery Fingers,” the Op is hired to solve the murder by penknife of a tycoon whose body is found in that mustiest of locales: the library. 

Hammett’s rougher Pinkerton experience, however, comes through in passages like this one, from “Crooked Souls,” in which the Op, who’s shadowing a suspect, describes a nifty bit of multitasking: “A touring-car, large, black, powerfully engined, and with lowered curtains, came from the rear. . . . Possibly a scout! I scrawled its license number down on my pad without taking my hand out of my overcoat pocket.”

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Original review on: www.washingtonpost.com

Book Review - The Future of War: A History by Lawrence Freedman

The saying “all is fair in love and war” has become a cliche, but it’s true that with romance as well as bloodshed, we prepare for the next one mainly by worrying about the mistakes of the last conflict.

Lawrence Freedman’s The Future of War: A History is only about the more martial of the two human endeavors, but there’s a lot to love in it.

Across two hundred and eighty-seven pages of prose, Freedman’s book is part retro-futurism, part dissertation on the difficulties of determining what actually is a war and who died in one, and, finally, part looking forward at the sort of armed conflicts yet to come.

It doesn’t all fit together seamlessly, or read equally engagingly, but Freedman shows his homework regardless of topic, and there’s an additional forty-five pages of notes and twenty-eight pages just devoted to bibliography if warfare of the recent past, present, and future pique your interest.

For non-specialists, the most enjoyable portion is, thankfully, the first bit.

Retro-futurism is immediately enjoyable for the ways people in the past missed the mark. In Part One, Freedman piles up examples of how popular military-fiction authors and professionals in the late 19th and early 20th century imagined the next wars — and how they imagined it wrong.

The Battle of Dorking by George Tomkyns Chesney in 1871 posited a rapid, successful surprise invasion of the British Isles by the German Empire; in 1902, a fore thinking H.G. Wells imagined tanks before their invention but also thought war balloons would dominate the skies and submarines would kill their crews.

Freedman doesn’t give many examples of people who got their predictions right. There’s a short section on the Polish banker Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch, who predicted in 1898 that an upcoming major war would favor defense and have soldiers relying on their spades more than their rifles, but acknowledging his foresight is the exception.

So Freedman picking out past missteps comes across a bit cheap when hindsight doesn’t need spectacles and when Freedman never, even at the end, goes out on a limb to make his own predictions. It’s possible that may have been a conscious choice by the author based on the influence that past off-the-mark predictions have had on decision makers and the wider public.

And that is ultimately the most engrossing aspect of Freedman’s book and one I wish had been the whole subject. As much as some folk might sincerely like current students to be taught nothing but engineering or coding, art hugely impacts life because it shapes the imagination of the people living.

Geopolitics mattered in 1914, but so did a generation of books assuming the British and Germans would be on opposing sides of a future war.

Nuclear technology and policy mattered, but so did Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert and Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy adaptation “Dr. Strangelove” in turning public opinion, including elite opinion, against the acceptability of a thermonuclear exchange between Cold War super powers.

Ronald Reagan’s appreciation for Tom Clancy books and the Matthew Broderick film “War Games” had a real influence on U.S. policy in the 1980s.

A Cassandra is someone giving a warning no one heeds, but Freedman, in tone, treats people whose warnings were heeded as if they were inaccurate rather than persuasive as well as prescient.

The major problem, and the hardest part to slog through, is Part Two when Freedman goes into defining what war really is and how one ought to count it.

This is not an unimportant subject; civil wars and sub-national entities inflicting casualties and deaths around the world are clearly not merely semantic issues, but in the context of this book, it’s a diversion, and a laborious one to plow through as a reader when sandwiched by the more interesting and imaginative prognostications.

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Original review on: www.nwprogressive.org

Book Review - Visions of Empire by Krishan Kumar

In the very first sentence of his newly-released book, author Krishan Kumar reveals that the study of empires has never been so popular. 

This revelation might come as a surprise for those of us who believed that with the demise of European empires — the British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese — after World War II, imperialism had become an outmoded concept.

Empires were large-scale, multinational and multicultural entities and this book examines the ideas and ideologies that shape not only our thinking on those entities, but also the policies of imperial rulers themselves.

According to the book, most Europe-based empires were inspired by the Roman Empire. They learned from it — especially its decline in the 15th century.

The Roman Empire inspired so many others but itself looked further back in history — to the Ancient Greek leader Alexander the Great — for inspiration. In fact, when Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the 3rd century BCE Maurya Empire, was asked how he built up his power, he is said to have replied: “I watched Alexander when I was still a young man.” 

Alexander the Great, he claimed, could have gone on to conquer all of India because his model of rule was superior to that of all the Indian princes.

Fast forward to the Roman Empire and thinkers such as Cicero were of the opinion that “the extension of citizenship to all of Rome’s subjects was of the essence of Rome’s empire, expressing its highest and most characteristic principle. 

It was the thing that made it distinctive in the world, setting it off from all other states and empires, past and present,” according to the book.

In his book, Kumar has selected five empires: The Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian, British and French. “At least I can say that the empires I have chosen represent, by any standard, size, power (and) impact, the most important of the modern empires and that all of them would have to be included in any account of the role of empires in the world.”

The first empire Kumar tackles is the Ottoman Empire. European writer have often wrongly confused Turks with the Ottomans and the latter has often been described as being savage and cruel.

The Ottoman Empire can be defined as a dynastic, multinational empire, ruling over a variety of peoples. In writer Colin Imber’s words, “the Ottoman Empire was not…exclusively Islamic, nor was it exclusively Turkish. 

Rather it was a dynastic empire in which the only loyalty demanded of all its multifarious inhabitants was allegiance to the sultan… It was, in the end, the person of the sultan and (religious), ethnic, or other identities that held the empire together.”

Ottomans were not exclusively Turks. The term Turk refers to an ethnic group that includes members from the Balkans, Anatolia and Arab countries. The Ottomans had a mission to protect all Muslims and to spread the cause of Islam in the world. 

The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim empire. Throughout its history, Islam was an indelible part of its identity. Ottoman rule was characterized by a pragmatism and realism that created “a remarkable model of how different communities can live under the mantle of a supranational power. 

However, when Turkish nationalism emerged in the 19th century, its ideas entirely opposed to the Ottoman tradition, (it) would lead eventually to the dissolution of the empire itself.

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Original review on: http://www.arabnews.com

Book Review - Password by Martin Paul Eve

We have come far as a civilised society and with it, the way we see or do things has seen a drastic change too. Take, for instance, the measure we use to keep our secrets safe. In simpler words -- the password.

While in the pre-Internet days, something as simple as "Open Sesame" would have done the trick, today even a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, a numeral and a special character, a word that is certainly not the username, a word much different from the last three passwords and 10 million other requirements are not enough to ward off potential hackers. 

Whatever happened to just using your favourite sports team, best friend's name or other memorable phrases as the password?

Since we spend a major chunk of our time on this combination of weird letters and symbols, it's high time we talked about it and explored its increasing significance in our currently digital world. 

This is what Martin Paul Eve sets out to do in his book "Password" as he explores "how 'what we know' became 'who we are', revealing how the modern notion of identity has been shaped by the password".

While Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at University of London's Birkbeck College, dwells on use of passwords down history, in military, in literature -- most importantly J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter series, where passwords are used in different forms -- in films and, of course, in the digital age, the important question is: What is its future?

If we were to go by dystopian sci-fi movies like "Blade Runner 2049", the answer would be that biometrics would replace it.

Though dismissing the contention that biometrics are a plot to kill the password, Eve does agree that it's a pretty solid way for authentication and identification. 

At the same time, he seeks to remind us how futile it can be, as shown in many films where a body part is removed from a dead or, in a more ghastly scenario, a still alive person to authenticate their biometrics.

So, coming back to the password, how do you keep your information, specially of the financial sort, safe? The question becomes more pertinent with the biggest global firms facing cyber security threats. 

But we can't help that. What we can do at our level is to make the password harder to crack (and may be not surf porn sites or torrents, and not save all our passwords in our phone?)

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Original review on: www.newkerala.com

Book Review - The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow

When German troops invade Prague in March 1939 and proceed to tighten their grip on the city, 30-year-old Otylie Bartošová is forced to relinquish the two things she holds most dear: her husband, and an anonymous 18th-century sonata manuscript bequeathed to her by her father. 

Jakub disappears to join the underground resistance. In a similar act of defiance, Otylie splits up the manuscript — “her birthright and burden” — to keep it from falling into Nazi hands, and then flees the city.

Just over 60 years later, early into the new millennium, an elderly Czech immigrant living in Queens entrusts young musicologist Meta Taverner with the second movement of the sonata. 

Enchanted by the music and stimulated by the challenge of finding the other two “orphaned movements” and the identity of the composer, Meta turns her back on her studies and her skeptical boyfriend and sets off for Prague.

The city casts its spell and captivates Meta. But she becomes disillusioned after funds run dry, leads become dead ends, and some of her musical mentor’s contacts prove suspect. It is only when she meets, and falls for, Czech-American reporter Gerrit Mills that she discovers fresh purpose. 

The pair pool their resources and widen their search. However, they are closely tracked by other parties, including a former Communist Party stooge with friends in high places and an interest in the manuscript that in time turns into a toxic obsession.

More than 12 years in the making, and more than 500 pages, “The Prague Sonata” is without doubt Bradford Morrow’s magnum opus. It has echoes of his last novel, “The Forgers,” which focused on another couple making sense of past mysteries, this time through twists and turns in the antiquarian book world. 

In his new book, Morrow delves deeper and aims higher. He splices his main narrative with flashbacks to the war, to Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, and to Otylie’s years in exile in London and her new life in “strange sky-draped Texas.”

History is thrillingly re-enacted or re-created. Musical passages are conveyed with lyrical grace. Regular doses of surprise and suspense keep us immersed and involved.

Books of this length are seldom fault-free. Morrow is a little too fond of his musical metaphors. Finely sprinkled Czech words and phrases authenticate the drama but entire random sentences in Czech, followed promptly by their English translation, are an unnecessary distraction. 

And for such a capacious novel, the Prague that is portrayed is a place of curiously tight confines: a restrictively small toy-town where nobody lives or ventures beyond the picture-postcard center.

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Original review on: http://www.startribune.com