Archive | June, 2011

What do you think is the greatest gift we have. Does something called Memory figure anywhere in the list! Even if it is absent, hats off to the creator, the one with the capital C, it’s one lovely technology put in place to recollect the past. However, it does become a burden when some phases of that past are painful and the sapiens concerned have sharp memories!! The ingenious memory technology then becomes a torture! Even then, to remember good times and bad, we have this something installed in our…

Also available as : “Journey into the night”Publication : Bill and Melinda Gates foundation Authors : 16 ( including William Darlymple , Shobha De , Salman Rushdie , Vikram Seth and many others .)

The book tells 16 stories about aids in our own country . The writers have outdone themselves . Each one of them takes us into the darkest , deepest corners of the world where we ,the ‘civilized’ people would think twice before entering .
Dr.Toku’s fight for a respectable life and now he rises for the…

Transforming his appearance and stealing secret documents from the French is all in a day’s work for fourteen-year-old Modo, a British secret agent. But his latest mission—to uncover the underwater mystery of something called the Ictíneo—seems impossible. There are rumors of a sea monster and a fish as big as a ship. French spies are after it, and Mr. Socrates, Modo’s master, wants to find it first. Modo and his fellow secret agent, Octavia, begin their mission in New York City, then take a steamship across the North Atlantic. During…

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Pic courtesy Goodreads.com

On My Honor
Written by Marion Dane Bauer
Published by Yearling books, an imprint of Random House Children’s books.
Reviewed by sandhya.
Peer pressure. Everyone faces it, children more so. It looms large in their small world, often leading to literally life-and-death situations.
Twelve year old Joel and Tony are ‘best friends’, very different in temperament, often squabbling and bickering, but inseparable.
Tony- exuberant, fun-loving, risk-taking, with a devil-may-care attitude. Joel, the more cautious of the two, introspecting, sensitive to undercurrents in a situation, a foil…

A friend who is an ardent cat lover picked this book just because the cover design had a Cat or rather a Crat on it. Her tastes in books are eclectic. So this choice came as no surprise.
The blurb on the book cover reads,
Malaisea, the unhealthiest town in the whole of Zamonia, is home to Echo the Crat, a multitalented creature resembling a cat in appearance but capable of speaking any language under the sun, human or animal. When his mistress dies, Echo finds himself out on the…

Title: Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking
Author: Allan + Barbara PeasePublisher: Manjul IndiaPages: 120Genre: Non Fiction / Self HelpRating: 9 out of 10

I happened to read a review of this book here, and it came across as a fun book. Since I have been in between books for a while now (owing to my other preoccupations), I wanted to pick up a quick-read to make myself feel better.

I have never read any of those “Man-Woman” books, say, “Men are from Mars and Women are…

France, 1585. She is the youngest and most powerful of the “Sisters of Faire Isle,” women known far and wide for their extraordinary mystical abilities. Skilled in healing and able to forecast the future of those around her, Miri Cheney has returned to her ancestral home to take refuge from a land devastated by civil war–and to grieve for her family, driven to exile. But she cannot hide from the formidable new power threatening to seize control of France from the dread “Dark Queen,” Catherine de Medici–a diabolical woman known…

Colors have been there as long as we can remember, till it dates back to ramayan or mahabharat infact. There has been a color description attached to the clothes, from the white of the purity to the saffron of the rishis to the pink, blue and red for the youth. Ever wondered where these colors came from?
How did the people in the faraway age when synthetic means were not known, make their colors? Does this question make you think even for a second? If yes in that this is…

Image from here.
Corporate Seer by Arun Purang starts off with issues in corporate life, the challenges one faces and how one can cope with them. Starting off with practical elements of the story, the book slowly moves to becoming philosophical.
The book starts with a story of a typical corporate problem and then slowly, the author brings in a dialogue and conversation between two people. One person talks problems and the other gives pragmatic solutions. The story has many stories within. Some stories talk about inspiration, motivation, dealing with…

When I started reading ‘Poems from the Heart’, being a lover of poetry I wanted to fall in love with the words. Few in the beginning looked quite promising but as I progressed I realized the writer was a novice and had left numerous loose ends in her poetry. Alana D.O. Babb has potential to be a good writer and she has done some very good writing too but she needs to learn and develop more skills of the trade.
‘An Open Book’ is one of the finest verses in…