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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Johnny Gone Down – Karan Bajaj

Nikhil Arya has fallen.

Once, he was an Ivy League scholar with a promising future at NASA; now, at forty, he is broke, homeless,and minutes away from blowing his brains out in a diabolical modern-day joust.

It wasnt meant to be this way. An innocent vacation turned into an epic intercontinental journey that saw Nikhil become first a genocidesurvivor, then a Buddhist monk, a drug lord, a homeless accountant, a software mogul and a deadly gamefighter. Now, twenty years later, Nikhil aka Johnny is tired of running. With the Colombian mafia on his trailand his abandoned wife and son ten thousand miles away, he prepares for his final act, aware that he will have lost even if he wins.

Or will he? Is there any greater victory than living a life that knows no limits, a world that has seen no boundaries?

From the bestselling author of Keep Off the Grass comes the once-in-a-lifetime story of an ordinary manfighting an extraordinary destiny. Can he pick up the pieces one last time or will Nikhil, now Johnny, go down for good?

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Monday, May 3, 2010

Book Summary: Indomitable Spirit by A.P.J. Abdul kalam

Book Summary: Indomitable Spirit

“What would you like to be remembered for? You have to evolve yourself and shape your life. You should write it on a page. That page maybe a very important page in the book of human history. And you will be remembered for creating that one page in the history of the nation – whether that page is the page of invention, the page of innovation or the page of discovery or the page of fighting injustice…”

Simple words spoken directly from the heart, revealing President Kalam’s deep concern for vital issues. Reflecting upon a wide range of themes of abiding human, national and global concerns, Dr Kalam’s inspiring, almost magical words engage and captivate the reader’s mind and heart.

Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, the eleventh President of India, has indeed captured the imagination of the people of India, like no other President ever before. Reaching out to the people of the country, especially the children, he has endeared himself with his simple style and imaginative thinking. His ‘Vision 2020′ – a dream for Developed India, has become a rallying point for people across all segments, and today we are all inspired with the glimmer of a better tomorrow. His own life reflects a dream-like rise, from the shores of Rameswaram to the hallowed Rashtrapati Bhawan, his journey is a story of indomitable spirit conquering all odds and emerging victorious.

Indomitable Spirit brings together the values, thoughts and ideals of President Kalam. Interspersed with interesting anecdotes and observations, Indomitable Spirit represents the quintessential A P J Abdul Kalam – the man, the scientist, the teacher and the President.

Autobiographical, inspirational, philosophical and yet pragmatic and realistic – Indomitable Spirit is a unique blend of all these and more, which fires the reader’s imagination and inspires with the thought that “anything is possible.” As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from indomitable will.”

11 Book Summary: Indomitable Spirit by A.P.J. Abdul kalam

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Friday, April 16, 2010

The Humble Administrator’s Garden – Vikram Seth

The Yangtse flows on like brown tape.
The research forms take final shape,
Each figure like a laden boat
With white or madder sails afloat.

Float on, float on, O facts and facts,
Distilled compendia of past acts,
Reveal the Grand Design to me,
Flotilla of my PhD.

In this collection, Vikram Seth has poetry and imagery from China, India and America. The poetry is heartfelt and marked by Vikram Seth’s penchant for using simple words to recreate truth, beauty and magic!

Get your copy today!!

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Unaccustomed Earth – Jhumpa Lahiri

From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories—a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate—we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with Jhumpa Lahiri’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is a masterful, dazzling work of a writer at the peak of her powers.

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Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri

Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.

In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.

Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.

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The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahir

A major international best-seller, “The Namesake” is the debut novel from Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of “Interpreter of Maladies” that bagged the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and won critical acclaim for its “grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.”

The Namesake is a the cross-cultural, multigenerational story of a Hindu Bengali family’s journey to self-acceptance in Boston. Jhumpa masterfully explores the themes of the complexities of the immigrant experience and foreignness, the clash of lifestyles, cultural disorientation, the conflicts of assimilation, the tangled ties between generations… and paints a portait of an Indian family torn between the pull of respecting family traditions, and the American way of life. It’s a tale of love, solitude and emotional upheavals with an amazing eye for detail and ironic observation.

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A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman – Joseph Rosa

I have always loved architecture. From Mughal to European architecture, from classic to modern architecture, from buildings to streets, from shape to size. it is just so amazing and fascinating.

Julius Shulman, one of the great master of architectural photography, is the preeminent recoreder of early California modernism.

By 1927, when he was sixteen, Shulman was already using the family Brownie box camera to document his Southern Californis surroundings and experiences; in 1936, his professional career was launched when he sent Richard Neutra some uncommissioned photographs of the architect’s Kun House. Shulman went on to document the famous Case Study House Program (architects included Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, and Eero Saarinen) and also the architecure of the 1930s through the 1980s, especially that of Southern California, but also country and worldwide.

His subjects included the buildings of R.M. Schindler, John Lautner, Raphael Soriano, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, among many others.

Through his work, Shulman defined the image of Los Angeles and framed the architecture of the time for a global audience. In addition to an overview of Shulman’s career and photographic oevre, this book emphasizes Shulman’s method of “constructing” photographic views. These contructions, which complemented his innate ability to compose striking photographs, often transcends reality to capture the spirit, time and place of a work of architecture. An analysis of architecture’s visual presentation examines not only the media of the era–John Entenza’s Arts & Architecture, for instance–but also the work of Shulman’s photographic contemporaries.

Get your copy !!

Barack Obama – In His Own Words

Since delivering his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has been hailed as the clear savior of not only the Democratic party, but of the integrity of American politics. Despite the fact that he burst onto the national scene seemingly overnight, his name recognition has grown by leaps and bounds ever since.

Barack Obama in His Own Words, a book of quotes from the Illinois Senator, allows those who aren’t as familiar with his politics to learn quickly where he stands on abortion, religion, AIDS, his critics, foreign policy, Iraq, the War on Terror, unemployment, gay marriage, and a host of other important issues facing America and the world.

Its a good read!!!

The Grand Illusion: Love, Lies, and My Life with Styx

The Grand Illusion: Love, Lies, and My Life with Styx – Chuck PanozzoMichele Skettino

They are still one of the biggest rock bands of the last three decades. With four consecutive triple-platinum albums and 54 million records sold, their tours continue to sell out and classic songs like “Lady,” “Renegade,” “Come Sail Away,” and “The Grand Illusion” have earned them a whole new generation of fans.

At the height of their fame, they were living the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll fantasy — an odyssey of groupies, drugs, and music that most musicians only dream of. As a band, Styx seemed invincible.

But their founding member and bass player, Chuck Panozzo, was about to hit rock bottom. His seemingly debauched life as the ultimate rocker was a lie — and the truth was about to catch up with him, amazing story of a courageous man fighting for his life against HIV and AIDS while still being in one of the biggest rock band.

The Grand Illusion is a no-holds-barred, backstage pass to the journey of one of the world’s most revered bands, and the true story of Chuck Panozzo’s 50-year struggle to reconcile his public life as a rock star with his private life as a gay man. Beginning with the birth of Styx in Chicago and their meteoric rise, The Grand Illusion is a revealing look at the triumphs and tragedies that surrounded Panozzo’s life. He chronicles life on the road, the break-up of the band, his struggle to help his twin brother and bandmate John Panozzo battle addiction, as well as his split with Dennis De Young, and finally coming to terms with his HIV positive status. Illuminating and unflinching

The Grand Illusion will captivate the band’s legions of devoted fans, as well as music lovers everywhere.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

If God Was a Banker – Ravi Subramanian

Well, this book takes you into the world of Multi-national banks.The story focuses on two characters who are completely different from each other,and are in a rat race for success.

This is a story peppered with ambition and frustration, deceit and malevolence, love and lust, and the desperate struggle for status and power. And, above all, there is a top-notch banker who plays the benevolent God whenever crises loom over the young guns… An insider’s fictionalised account of how Indian professionals experience the world of foreign banks

You can really feel the competition and pressure in today’s banking by reading thru this book.You get to know the damage that is caused by managers “looking for Performance at any cost” & the stability and benefits of teams under system driven managers.

Worth a bed time read for people who can relate to it!!

A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Outlander) – Diana Gabaldon

Eagerly anticipated by her legions of fans, this sixth novel in Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling Outlander saga is a masterpiece of historical fiction from one of the most popular authors of our time.

Since the initial publication of Outlander fifteen years ago, Diana Gabaldon’s New York Times bestselling saga has won the hearts of readers the world over — and sold more than twelve million books. Now, “A Breath of Snow and Ashes” continues the extraordinary story of 18th-century Scotsman Jamie Fraser and his 20th-century wife, Claire.

The year is 1772, and on the eve of the American Revolution, the long fuse of rebellion has already been lit. Men lie dead in the streets of Boston, and in the backwoods of North Carolina, isolated cabins burn in the forest.

With chaos brewing, the governor calls upon Jamie Fraser to unite the backcountry and safeguard the colony for King and Crown. But from his wife Jamie knows that three years hence the shot heard round the world will be fired, and the result will be independence — with those loyal to the King either dead or in exile. And there is also the matter of a tiny clipping from The Wilmington Gazette, dated 1776, which reports Jamie’s death, along with his kin. For once, he hopes, his time-traveling family may be wrong about the future.

A Dangerous Fortune – Ken Follett

This is so far one of my favorite book..
I honestly say that this is a real page-turner and you’ll be hooked up ’til you finish it, this book is about everyone’s greed for money that they’re able to do even the impossible just to get it.

In 1866 tragedy strikes at the exclusive Windfield School when a mysterious accident takes the life of a student. Among the student’s circle of friends are Hugh Pilaster; Hugh’s older cousin Edward, dissolute heir to the Pilaster banking fortune; and Micky Miranda, the handsome son of a brutal South American oligarchy. The death and its aftermath begin the spiraling circle of treachery that will span three decades and entwine many lives.

Definitely a must read!!

A Cool Billion – Michael C Perkins & Celia H Nunez

Welcome to Silicon Valley, a place where wealth is counted not in millions, but in billions of dollars; where the ambition is to own not a fleet of cars, but a hangar full of planes; and where the Forbes 400 list serves as a de facto Social Register.

This is the world so vividly captured in this insightful debut novel. Written by the ultimate Silicon Valley insiders, Michael C. Perkins and Celia , A Cool Billion gives readers a glimpse of the exclusive and frenetic world of the decade’s new power players.

A Cool Billion is a classic tale of avarice and ego, with a 21st century twist: An ambitious journalist, Steven Cavanaugh, pushes a friend to dig up confidential information about the high tech startup where she works. She agrees, and turns up dead the next day. Enraged and guilt-ridden, Steven pursues the man he suspects killed her—until he stumbles onto a billion-dollar conspiracy. Now the race is on: the conspirators are after Steven, and his only hope for survival is to elude them long enough to unravel their identities.

Give it a read!!

Black Series: Poems – Laurie Sheck

n her remarkable Black Series, Laurie Sheck turns the ordinary world inside out and shows us its glittering seams. Her long, elegantly quizzical lines convey a haunted vision of human striving which is in part an elaboration on our daily reality, and in part a fantastic departure from it. “I can almost taste the glassy air,” she writes. “Where are the birds in it, / wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright / chaos of atomized instances . . . ?” Roaming freely in the shifting landscape of the imagination, Sheck delivers an inner life that is just as vivid as what we see around us; at the same time, she shows us what we see in a new light, bringing illumination even to darkness:

It’s the black night that wakes in me,
so dominant, so focused.
And then a car goes by and I think,
“I’m in the world,”
tires kicking up gravel from the dust.
What does the orange hawkweed do
inside this dark–its radiance
secretive but not extinguished?

To read this collection is to discover at every turn that secretive but undeniable radiance, and a language that is both riveting and distinctive.

For those who write poems and have a similar passion!!

All Things Possible: My Story of Faith, Football, and the First Miracle Season – Kurt Warner

NFL sensation Kurt Warner tells the incredible story of faith and perseverance that captured the hearts of millions and rocketed him from obscurity to become MVP and Super Bowl champion.

After being cut by the Green Bay Packers during training camp in 1994, Kurt Warner found himself working the graveyard shift at the Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and living with his girlfriend Brenda and her two children in the basement of her parents’ house. Just over five years later, Kurt completed his journey from supermarket to Super Bowl when he led the St. Louis Rams to victory in Super Bowl XXXIV.

Warner tells the story of his life both on and off the field, and the faith that keeps him going through bad times and the good times.

Truly an inspiring story, a must read!!

Atlas Shrugged

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is her one of most prolific follower.

Either you like the philosphy of this book or you will hate but you can’t able to neglet this one.It’s about captalism and reccession make this book more relevant in current scenario.

This book supports to be selfish and winner take it all is main theme what I got from this book and from whole Ayn rand philosophy(which is called Objectivism).

Best lines from the book: “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.”

The theme of Atlas Shrugged, as Rand described it, is “the role of man’s mind in existence.” The book explores a number of philosophical themes that Rand would subsequently develop into the philosophy of Objectivism. It advocates the core tenets of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and expresses her concept of human achievement. In doing so it expresses many facets of Rand’s philosophy, such as the advocacy of reason, individualism, the market economy and the failure of government coercion.

Atlas Shrugged received largely negative reviews after its 1957 publication, but achieved enduring popularity and consistent sales in the following decades. In the wake of the late 2000s recession sales of Atlas Shrugged have sharply increased, according to The Economist magazine and The New York Times. The Economist reported that the fifty-two-year-old novel ranked #33 among Amazon.com’s top-selling books .The novel has been seen as highly influential in conservative and libertarian circles.

Take a deep breath and start this novel for experience of lifetime ………..

26/11 The Attack on Mumbai – Vir Sangavi

The attack on Mumbai shocked the world. For three days terrorists wreaked havoc over multiple venues in India’s commercial capital, leaving a trail of blood, death and destruction. Reporters from Hindustan Times tracked the events as they unfolded at Cama Hospital, the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus and followed the three-day siege at the Taj and Trident Hotels and at Nariman House.

The collection brings together their dispatches as well as commentaries, profiles and columns published during the siege and its aftermath. This is a dramatic snapshot of the victims, heroes and perpetrators of the attacks and also of the outrage that still grips the nation.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Simply Fly – GopinathCaptain GR

Simply Fly is the best book I have read in the recent times. This is a first person account from someone who built the first chopper service company and a low cost airliner in India. This is the first person account of a humble middle class Indian who grew in a village,became an army officer, built a farm, ventured in auto business, politics and eventually
Deccan Aviation the chopper service company and Deccan Airways the airline of the “Common man” of India.

They say – “Eye on the sky and feet on the ground”. Gopinath has lived it upto it. Feet on the ground is his love of Nature, Farms and earth. Eye on the sky is literally his love of flying and aircrafts.

Former President Mr. APJ Abdul Kalam has mentioned tha this book should become a text book in all management institutions.

Gopinath is a brilliant story teller. Its really hard to believe that this is his first book.
There are many lessons for the ambitious in this book. The author stays in our memory as a humble, compassionate, hardworking and brave person who is a pioneer in many ways.

Definitely a must read!!

The Difficulty of being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

Dharite iti dharma(what good thing you wear(follow) that is dharma(your religion))

The Difficulty of being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

A book loosely based on Mahabharata,The Ambani brothers are like Duryodhan? Ramalingam Raju of Satyam infamy (India’s biggest corporate scandal) as Dhritashtra? No, these aren’t gimmicky comparisons, but come out of a fairly scholarly work by the well-known writer Gurcharan Das,One of my favorite columnist and journalist.It’s about Dharma and Adhrma in modern scenario .

In his previous work,India unbound,Das take on Artha(money) and examined it’s meaning in our own Indian scenario,now he examined the meaning of Dharma(why is to be good?).It addresses the central problem of how to live our lives in an examined way—holding a mirror up to us and forcing us to confront the many ways in which we deceive ourselves and others. What emerges is a doctrine of dharma that we can apply to our business decisions, political strategies and interpersonal relationships—in effect, to life itself.

Not only a great read but it give a mirror to check yourself .

The Music Room

“Many thousand miles away from the earth, a space capsule sent out many years ago contains in it several recordings and photographs that define the earth, in a way. The idea was to introduce the earth to alien species should the space capsule encounter them in distant space and time. Among the musical recordings was an old 78 rpm record discovered in a little known New York shop,this was Kesarbai Kerkar’s immortal rendering of a bhajan in Raag Bhairavi – ‘Janaat Kahaan re’.“