This is a timely book, coming at a moment in the new century when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is trying to develop a moderate profile in ideological terms, continue its tough stand on Pakistan, when it has been forced to retreat, considerably bruised, from the episode in Gujarat when the party lifted the ban on government servants joining the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and when the new RSS leadership is sounding off about swadeshi (whatever that means) and the role of the majority community, writes Sanjoy Hazarika

Vladimir Lenin had called Nikolai Buhkarin the "golden boy of the Revolution". Post-Lenin, Josef Stalin thought otherwise. In 1937, the brilliant scholar and revolutionary ideologue was expelled from the party and arrested in 1937 on grounds of being a Trotskyite. Bukharin was dubbed a "hired murderer, saboteur, and wrecker in the service of fascism." He was even accused of having once plotted to assassinate Lenin and was summarily executed the following year. Between February 1937 and March 1938, Bukharin spent his days in Moscow's Lubyanka prison writing four books, says Subir Ghosh

n 1984, a twenty-year-old punkette with two-toned hair and a plastic raincoat boarded an American Airlines jet and left home, in search of a fantasy that she wanted to make into a life. That nice Catholic kid gone haywire was me, fleeing toward a future as a poet, a rock star, a groupie, anything but the accounted-for accounting major my dad said I should be. My fantasy was the floating world where artists and other weirdos made their own rules, turning their lives in the city's twilight into one long experiment. Excerpts

The Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and aggressively pursued a policy of radical social reform that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians through mass executions and physical privation. In January 1979, the government was overthrown by former Khmer Rouge functionaries, with substantial backing from the army of Vietnam. In August of that year a special court, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal, was constituted to try two of the Khmer Rouge government's most powerful leaders, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. The charge against them was genocide as it was defined in the United Nation's genocide convention of 1948. At the time, both men were in the Cambodian jungle leading the Khmer Rouge in a struggle to regain power; they were, therefore, tried in absentia. Book description

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the leading social thinkers of the twentieth century, long concerned himself with the problems of moral philosophy, or "whether the good life is a genuine possibility in the present." This book consists of a course of seventeen lectures given in May-July 1963. Captured by tape recorder (which Adorno called "the fingerprint of the living mind"), these lectures present a somewhat different, and more accessible, Adorno from the one who composed the faultlessly articulated and almost forbiddingly perfect prose of the works published in his lifetime. Here we can follow Adorno's thought in the process of formation (he spoke from brief notes), endowed with the spontaneity and energy of the spoken word. Book description