Archive : Books & Literature

The new book by famous French photographer Bettina Rheims is out. It is difficult to slot it in a genre. It is partially erotica, to some it may seem as a glamorous fashion shoot, some might even claim it is an art monograph, some may declare it as a metaphysical mystery, some of might see it as a social and cultural archeology of the French capital, [...]

You may not rate James Patterson, author of thriller novels, very high on quality but you have to rate him very high on quantity. He has never been acclaimed for producing what is called “high literature”. His thriller novels are mostly about a psychologist named Alex Cross and follows the basic best seller formula in the tradition of Dan Brown. [...]

UN’s top climate man Raj Pachauri has been in the eye of storm ever since the press reported fudged up research data from his team, about the melting of Himalayan Glaciers. His latest venture may well risk his being dubbed as someone with the steamy side up. He has written a racy novel which doles out oodles of sex, reincarnation and a Hollywood actress! The [...]

Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society is a lesson for humans, culled from studies on primate behavior. The fascinating lessons push the boundaries between man and animal. The book is also a plea for the use in human society of the concept of ‘living together.’ Frans de Waal, a multi-awarded primatologist and [...]

Gabriela Campos, an intern at the Institute for Policy Studies, talks about a compilation of analyses regarding the New Taliban. The book, entitled Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field, is edited by Antonio Giustozzi who is a fellow at the London School of Economics. The book asserts that a stronger Neo-Taliban has definitely emerged, [...]

Beauty and its ideals change every week and the way media portrays beauty is largely responsible for what we think is beautiful or sexually attractive. You must be surprised to know that the concept of beauty has existed even before the times of Neanderthals, and it has always been about not just procreation and attractiveness, but also about power [...]

France’s most prominent female psychologist Maryse Vaillant has revealed that men who cheat are actually good for a marriage. She tells us how men and women need breathing space and binding them together in the concept of fidelity can ruin marriages. Instead, an amount of freedom is excruciatingly necessary, and in fact the idea of a man staying [...]

The movie is stuffed with melodrama and cheesy lines, shirtless men with rock-hard abs, pangs of sappy romantic love, dizzying camera work, racial stereotypes, occasional spurts of humor, love lessons for girls, passable soundtrack, doses of sex appeal, some neat fight sequences, comprehensible mythology, and philosophical musings. All in all, these [...]

Deciphering the plays of William Shakespeare in a school essay was apparently not enough for two students, who wrote a book with phrases that sum up Twitter and satirical works of literature. The “Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter”, which will be released by Penguin in November in the United Kingdom is [...]

Google Editions, service of digital books sale of the company, will inaugurate in June of 2010. The information was given by Amanda Edmonds, director of strategic partnerships of Google, in the TOC conference, in Frankfurt. According to her, one of the strong points of the program is that, once bought, the e-book is going to a “cloud library”, [...]