The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

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  The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

  Rs. 2,990.00
  

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  Christopher Simon Sykes

   

  At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes’ lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work, and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it.

   

  The Sykes-Picot agreement was a secret pact drawn up in May 1916 between the French and the British, to divide the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the event of an allied victory in the First World War. Agreed without any Arab involvement, it negated an earlier guarantee of independence to the Arabs made by the British. Controversy has raged around it ever since.

   

  Sir Mark Sykes was not, however, a blimpish, ignorant Englishman. A passionate traveller, explorer and writer, his life was filled with adventure. From a difficult, lonely childhood in Yorkshire and an early life spent in Egypt, India, Mexico, the Arabian desert, all the while reading deeply and learning languages, Sykes published his first book about his travels through Turkey aged only twenty. After the Boer War, he returned to map areas of the Ottoman Empire no cartographer had yet visited. He was a talented cartoonist, excellent mimic and amateur actor, gifts that ensured that when elected to parliament a full House of Commons would assemble to listen to his speeches.

   

  During the First World War, Sykes was appointed to Kitchener’s staff, became Political Secretary to the War Cabinet and a member of the Committee set up to consider the future of Asiatic Turkey, where he was thirty years younger than any of the other members. This search would dominate the rest of his life. He was unrelenting in his pursuit of peace and worked himself to death to find it, a victim of both exhaustion and the Spanish Flu.

   

  Written largely based on the previously undisclosed family letters and illustrated with Sykes’ cartoons, this sad story of an experienced, knowledgeable, good-humoured and generous man once considered the ideal diplomat for finding a peaceful solution continues to reverberate across the world today.

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  Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

  Rs. 3,990.00
  

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  Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

   

  Buy why nations fail and get it delivered to your doorstep.

   

  “You will have three reasons to love this book. It’s about national income differences within the modern world, perhaps the biggest problem facing the world today. It’s peppered with fascinating stories that will make you a spellbinder at cocktail parties—such as why Botswana is prospering and Sierra Leone isn’t. And it’s a great read. Like me, you may succumb to reading it in one go, and then you may come back to it again and again.” —Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the bestsellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse

   

  “For economics and political-science students, surely, but also for the general reader who will appreciate how gracefully the authors wear their erudition.”—Kirkus Reviews

   

  “Why Nations Fail is a wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.” —The New York Times (Chrystia Freeland)

   

  “Why Nations Fail is a splendid piece of scholarship and a showcase of economic rigor.” —The Wall Street Journal

   

  “This is an intellectually rich book that develops an important thesis with verve. It should be widely read.” —Financial Times

   

  “Why Nations Fail is a truly awesome book. Acemoglu and Robinson tackle one of the most important problems in the social sciences—a question that has bedeviled leading thinkers for centuries—and offer an answer that is brilliant in its simplicity and power. A wonderfully readable mix of history, political science, and economics, this book will change the way we think about economic development. Why Nations Fail is a must-read book.” —Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

   

  “Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail.” —George Akerlof, Nobel laureate in economics, 2001

   

  “It’s the politics, stupid! That is Acemoglu and Robinson’s simple yet compelling explanation for why so many countries fail to develop. From the absolutism of the Stuarts to the antebellum South, from Sierra Leone to Colombia, this magisterial work shows how powerful elites rig the rules to benefit themselves at the expense of the many.  Charting a careful course between the pessimists and optimists, the authors demonstrate history and geography need not be destiny. But they also document how sensible economic ideas and policies often achieve little in the absence of fundamental political change.”—Dani Rodrik, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

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  Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

  Rs. 2,990.00
  

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  Yuval Noah Harari

   

  **THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER**

  NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

  Wellcome Book Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017)

   

  “Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. Above all, it will make you think in ways you had not thought before.” — Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast, and Slow

   

  “Thrilling to watch such a talented author trample so freely across so many disciplines… Harari’s skill lies in the way he tilts the prism in all these fields and looks at the world in different ways, providing fresh angles on what we thought we knew… scintillating.” — Financial Times

   

  “Spellbinding… This is a very intelligent book, full of sharp insights and mordant wit… It is a quirky and cool book, with a sliver of ice at its heart… It is hard to imagine anyone could read this book without getting an occasional, vertiginous thrill.” — Guardian

   

  “Harari is an intellectual magpie who has plucked theories and data from many disciplines – including philosophy, theology, computer science and biology – to produce a brilliantly original, thought-provoking and important study of where mankind is heading.” — Evening Standard (London)

   

  “I enjoyed reading about these topics not from another futurist but from a historian, contextualizing our current ways of thinking amid humanity’s long march–especially…with Harari’s ability to capsulize big ideas memorably and mingle them with a light, dry humor…Harari offers not just history lessons but a meta-history lesson.” — Washington Post

   

  “What elevates Harari above many chroniclers of our age is his exceptional clarity and focus.” — London Sunday Times

   

  “A remarkable book, full of insights and thoughtful reinterpretations of what we thought we knew about ourselves and our history.” — The Guardian

   

  “Provocative…the handiwork of a gifted thinker.” — Jennifer Senior, New York Times

   

  “[A] great book…not only alters the way you see the world after you’ve read it, it also casts the past in a different light. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari shows us where mankind is headed in an absolutely clear-sighted & accessible manner.” — Mail on Sunday

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  Capital in the Twenty-First Century

  Rs. 3,990.00
  

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  Thomas Piketty

   

  • A New York Times #1 Bestseller
  • An Amazon #1 Bestseller
  • A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
  • A USA Today Bestseller
    
  • A Sunday Times Bestseller
    
  • A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
    
  • Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2014
    
  • Winner of the British Academy Medal
    
  • Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

   

  “It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year―and maybe of the decade. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.”―Paul Krugman, New York Times

   

  “In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty’s latest work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is clearly modeled after Marx’s Das Kapital. But where Marx’s research was spotty, Piketty’s is prodigious. And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy–owners of capital–capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income…Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. Piketty offers a timely and well-reasoned reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.”―Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

   

  “Magisterial… Bursting with ideas… This book is economics at its best.”―Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education

   

  “In Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Piketty sums up his research, tracing the history and pattern of economic inequality across a number of countries from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing its causes, and evaluating some policy fixes. Spanning nearly 700 densely packed pages, it’s a big book in more than one sense of the word. Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty’s Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. But what is particularly exciting about this book is that, due to advances in technology, Piketty is able to draw on data that not only spans a substantially longer historical time frame, but is also necessarily more complete and consistent than the records earlier theorists were forced to rely on. As a result, his analysis is significantly more comprehensive than those of his predecessors― and easily as persuasive… Capital is a consistently engrossing read, encompassing topics including the stunning comeback that inherited wealth has made in today’s advanced economies, the dubiousness of the economic theory that a worker’s wage is equal to his or her marginal productivity, the moral insidiousness of meritocratic justifications of inequality, and more. But the book’s major strength lies in Piketty’s ability to see the big picture. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they’re likely to develop in the century to come… America’s twenty-first-century inequality crisis is, if anything, even more daunting and complex than the one we experienced a century ago. But as Piketty reminds us, the solutions to this problem are political, and they lie within our grasp. Should Americans choose to deploy those solutions, not only would we be doing the right thing, we’d be living up to our deepest traditions and most cherished ideals.”―Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly

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  The Story of Che Guevara

  Rs. 2,890.00
  

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  Lucía Álvarez de Toledo

   

  ‘Lucía Álvarez de Toledo captures the essence of Che the man with a heart-warming and inspirational text … a most rewarding book, whose significance should not be underestimated’ ― Morning Star

   

  An accessible biography of one of the most influential figures of recent times based on new, original research.

   

  Che Guevara is something of a symbol in the West. But for the rest of the world he is different: a charismatic revolutionary who redrew the political map of Latin America and gave hope to those resisting colonialism everywhere. In The Story of Che Guevara Lucía Álvarez de Toledo follows Che from his birth in Rosario and his early years in his parent’s maté plantation, to his immortal motorcycle journeys across South America, his role at the heart of Castro’s new Cuban government, and through to the unforgiving jungle that formed the backdrop to his doomed campaigns in the Congo and Bolivia.

   

  Based on interviews with Che’s family and those who knew him intimately, this is an accessible biography that concentrates on the man rather than the icon. With the political developments in Latin America in the twenty-first century, his influence can be seen to be even greater than it was during his lifetime and The Story of Che Guevara is a perfect introduction to an extraordinary man.

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  The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

  Rs. 7,190.00
  

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  Daniel Yergin

   

  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and hailed as “the best history of oil ever written” by Business Week, Daniel Yergin’s “spellbinding…irresistible” (The New York Times) account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power addresses the ongoing energy crisis.

   

  “Splendid and epic history of oil…. The story is brilliantly told…with its remarkable cast of characters.” — The Wall Street Journal

   

  “Impassioned and riveting…only in the great epics of Homer will readers regularly run into a comparable string of larger-than-life swashbucklers and statesmen, heroes and villains.” — San Francisco Examiner

   

  “A masterly narrative…The Prize portrays the interweaving of national and corporate interests, the conflicts and stratagems, the miscalculations, the follies, and the ironies.” — James Schlesinger, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and U.S. Secretary of Energy

   

  “Spellbinding…irresistible…monumental…must be read to understand the first thing about the role of oil in modern history.” — The New York Times

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  The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz

  Rs. 3,890.00 Rs. 2,990.00
  

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  Erik Larson

   

  • #1 New York Times Bestseller
  • Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for History & Biography (2020)

   

  ‘Fresh, fast and deeply moving … Larson’s deft portraits show the essential connection that words created between the powerful and the powerless, capturing the moments that defined life for millions struggling to survive the decisions of a few’ New York Times Book Review

   

  ‘If you want to look back at a really important part of history with fresh eyes, this is the book for you … Gripping and wonderful’ Alan Carr

   

  ‘There are countless books about World War II, but there’s only one Erik Larson … There are many things to admire about The Splendid and the Vile, but chief among them is Larson’s electric writing. The book reads like a novel, and even though everyone (hopefully) knows how the war ultimately ended, he keeps the reader turning the pages with his gripping prose.’ NPR

   

  ‘A particularly gripping read, written with bounce and brio. Larson pulls together vivid vignettes – some moving, some amusing, a few grim … A fine writer of narrative nonfiction history.’ Robbie Millen, Times

   

  ‘A captivating history of Churchill’s heroic year, with more than the usual emphasis on his intimates.’ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

   

  ‘This book is peppered with eye-popping details … A deeply compelling work of history … Without resorting to heroism, it makes one long powerfully for real leadership’ Lit Hub

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  Long Walk to Freedom

  Rs. 2,890.00
  

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  Nelson Mandela

   

  • Alan Paton Award (1995)

   

  These memoirs from one of the great leaders of our time are ‘essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it’ –Barack Obama

   

  ‘Enthralling . . . Mandela emulates the few great political leaders such as Lincoln and Gandhi, who go beyond mere consensus and move out ahead of their followers to break new ground’ —Sunday Times

   

  ‘The authentic voice of Mandela shines through this book . . . humane, dignified and magnificently unembittered’ —The Times

   

  ‘Burns with the luminosity of faith in the invincible nature of human hope and dignity . . . Unforgettable’ –Andre Brink

   

  Riveting…both a brilliant description of a diabolical system and a testament to the power of the spirt to transcend it —Washington Post

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  From Third World to First: The Singapore Story – 1965-2000

  Rs. 3,990.00
  

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  Lee Kuan Yew

   

  In this memoir, the man most responsible for Singapore’s astonishing transformation from colonial backwater to economic powerhouse describes how he did it over the last four decades. It’s a dramatic story, and Lee Kuan Yew has much to brag about. To take a single example: Singapore had a per-capita GDP of just $400 when he became prime minister in 1959. When he left office in 1990, it was $12,200 and rising. (At the time of this book’s writing, it was $22,000.) Much of this was accomplished through a unique mix of economic freedom and social control. Lee encouraged entrepreneurship, but also cracked down on liberties that most people in the West take for granted–chewing gum, for instance. It’s banned in Singapore because of “the problems caused by spent chewing gum inserted into keyholes and mailboxes and on elevator buttons.” If American politicians were to propose such a thing, they’d undoubtedly be run out of office. Lee, however, defends this and similar moves, such as strong antismoking laws and antispitting campaigns: “We would have been a grosser, ruder, cruder society had we not made these efforts to persuade people to change their ways…. It has made Singapore a more pleasant place to live in. If this is a ‘nanny state,’ I am proud to have fostered one.”

  Lee also describes one of his most controversial proposals: tax breaks and schooling incentives to encourage educated men and women to marry each other and have children. “Our best women were not reproducing themselves because men who were their educational equals did not want to marry them…. This lopsided marriage and procreation pattern could not be allowed to remain unmentioned and unchecked,” writes Lee. Most of the book, however, is a chronicle of how Lee helped create so much material prosperity. Anticommunism is a strong theme throughout, and Lee comments broadly on international politics. He is cautiously friendly toward the United States, chastising it for a “dogmatic and evangelical” foreign policy that scolds other countries for human-rights violations, except when they interfere with American interests, “as in the oil-rich Arabian peninsula.” Even so, he writes, “the United States is still the most benign of all the great powers…. [and] all noncommunist countries in East Asia prefer America to be the dominant weight in the power balance of the region.” From Third World to First is not the most gripping book imaginable, but it is a vital document about a fascinating place in a time of profound transition. –John J. Miller

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  Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy

  Rs. 2,490.00
  

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  Supriya Vani and Carl A. Harte

   

  The first biography to be based on interviews with Ardern and those around her

   

  ‘It takes courage to be an empathetic leader. And I think if anything the world needs empathetic leadership now, perhaps more than ever.’ Jacinda Ardern

   

  Jacinda Ardern was swept to office in 2017 on a wave of popular enthusiasm dubbed ‘Jacindamania’. In less than three months, she rose from deputy leader of the opposition to New Zealand’s highest office. Her victory seemed heroic. Few in politics would have believed it possible; fewer still would have guessed at her resolve and compassionate leadership, which, in the wake of the horrific Christchurch mosque shootings of March 2019, brought her international acclaim. Since then, her decisive handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen her worldwide standing rise to the point where she is now celebrated as a model leader. In 2020 she won an historic, landslide victory and yet, characteristically, chose to govern in coalition with the Green Party.

   

  Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy carefully explores the influences – personal, social, political and emotional – that have shaped Ardern. Peace activist and journalist Supriya Vani and writer Carl A. Harte build their narrative through Vani’s exclusive interviews with Ardern, as well as the prime minister’s public statements and speeches and the words of those who know her. We visit the places, meet the people and understand the events that propelled the daughter of a small-town Mormon policeman to become a committed social democrat, a passionate Labour Party politician and a modern leader admired for her empathy and courage.

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