When journalist John Cornwell started working on this book, it was with the sole intention of exonerating Pope Pius XII, arguably the most powerful and controversial Pope in modern history. The exhaustive research conducted by Cornwell, who had himself once studied for priesthood, made him conclude otherwise. Readers will agree. Irony of ironies -- the Vatican is said to be preparing to canonise Pius XII.

Eugenio Pacelli, career church lawyer and diplomat, was elected Pope on 3 March, 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. The man was as influential and important as were his wartime contemporaries like Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin. Yet, a definitive biography of the man was never written for lack of adequate sources. So when he sought to vindicate the Pope's stand during Second World War and absolve him of all charges, Cornwell gained access to documents the access to which were hitherto restricted. He did not have a clue what he would stumble upon. But when he did and supplemented it with the material he gathered from German sources, the halo vanished. It left him "in a state I can only describe as moral shock." The anti-Pacelli statements that were mere allegations till now, has become the irrefutable truth. This truth certainly hurts.

In May 1940, French cardinal Eugene Tisserant wrote privately to the cardinal archbishop of Paris, Emmanuel Suhard: "I fear that history will reproach the Holy See for having practiced a policy of selfish convenience and little else." Few agreed with Tisserant, fewer still aired their views. The can of worms was opened after the death of Pius XII in October 1958. Among the first to commit heresy was Rolf Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy". His disposition towards Nazi Germany and inexplicable silence at the annihilation of Jews was questioned. It was this aspect of Pius XII that have been dealt with by writers. But Cornwell digs deeper and reveals his utter contempt of Judaism.

Known as the "icebox Pope", the Italian-born born Pius XII used his papal powers to make the papacy a citadel of absolutist power in his quest of sainthood. This he did long after his sympathetic dealings with Adolf Hitler as papal nuncio to Germany prior to his election as Pope. Pacelli, in any case, as Cornwell points out, was there at all the politically wrong places at all the wrong times -- from the signing the Serbian concordat that accentuated World War I to the signing of the Reich concordat with Hitler in 1933. He trivialised the Nazi Final Solution and went to the extent of endorsing Croatian Fascism during the World War II. The Reich concordat was, according to Hitler, help the Nazis "in the developing struggle against the international Jewry".

In his charting out the rise and rise of the anti-Semitic Pacelli, what Cornwell did was he "told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era ... from an early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy towards the Jews ... his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler's regime and thwarted the Final Solution." The callous Pacelli was as racist as he was anti-Semitic as his request that the Allies should desist from deploying "coloured" soldiers in the relief of Rome in 1944 indicates. Hitler could not have asked for a better acquiescing ally. Without Pacelli's tacit approval and blessing, it would have been difficult for the Fuhrer to justify the Holocaust. For Pius XII it did not matter who was killed or what happened as long as he retained his papal prowess.

It is not apostasy to condemn and expose a man who held the highest office in churchdom. It would be, on the other hand, a sacrilege to condone Pacelli. Those who refuse to take a strident stand on the issue are the ones who have been exculpating him on the ground that Pius XII was a product of his circumstances, times. But that we all are, as even was Hitler. The research left Cornwell "convinced that the cumulative verdict of history shows him not to be a saintly exemplar for future generations, but a deeply flawed human being from whom Catholics, and our relations with other religions, can best profit by expressing our sincere regret." He goes on to conclude "Pacelli's failure to respond to the enormity of the Holocaust was more than a personal failure, it was a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism." If only Pope John II, who even recently defended Pius XII as stoutly as he could, would agree.

The problem with theistic approaches towards and analyses of fundamentalism is that they do not serve much purpose. Moderates will always be at loggerheads with extremists. Dichotomy in religion has always existed and will continue to exist. All non-primitive religions were established by social rebels. But once established, all these religions did was to curb subsequent generations of social rebels. There always have been people who have brayed for blood in the name of religion. Means and ends always differ for different people. When you classify them broadly, you have the moderates and the extremists. Howsoever much liberals might try to justify why the radicals should not exist, more often than not they (the former) fail to be convincing as to why they (the latter) exist in the first place.

Liberals and radicals perceive each other as the enemy within. They are as obsessed with each other as with outside extra-religious enemies. Each is embarrassed of the other. Liberals, with the intolerance of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists, with the apostasy of liberals. Liberals think fundamentalists distort religion, fundamentalists believe liberals compromise with it. So when liberals like Karen Armstrong, once a nun herself, have something to express about radicals, their Utopian arguments lack conviction. It is difficult to detach oneself from one's milieu and pass a judgment on it. When it is religion that we are talking about, such detachment never takes place. Self-important, pompous ramblings are all that result from a subjective assessment owing to one's own ideological predilections. The title of the book is a misnomer -- it should have been something along the lines of The Internecine Battle in the Name of God.

If we are to believe liberals, then fundamentalists are, simply put, passionate religious believers. This argument lacks credence since one would have to, in that case, perforce make the assumption that moderates lack in passion. It is not that only zealots are full of zeal, liberals do not lack in ardour either. The only difference between the two sides of the religious coin is that there is a head on one side and tails on the other. If they disagree on any count, it has more to do with the extent they can go or not go to promote their faith than anything else. While neither is faithless, each accuses the other of acting in contravention to tradition. The inherent dichotomy persists because of the perception about who the enemy is. The religious order is cleaved further when divergent opinions surface over how stringently they should follow the practices prescribed by faith. Besides these two inextricably linked contrasts, there are not any.

The ilk of Armstrong contends that in trying to defend religious tradition or traditional religion (whichever way you choose to look at it) from modernity, fundamentalists do more harm to faith in the process. Liberals assert that traditions need not be defended. What they refuse to concede is that the old order always changeth. It is always that the obsolete yield to the new. It is always that traditional practices recede into obscurity. That is how the process of human civilisation rolls on. Rules change, laws change, practices change, beliefs change. It is amusing to see how liberals and radicals differ over their perception of tradition and change. The first lobby thinks traditions need not be protected because they do not need to be. The second affirms that it should be. Both are wrong. Liberals suffer from the self-deluding notion that tradition carry on. Radicals know traditions do change, but beguile themselves into believing that they can resist and desist change. And while these believers continue slipping forward and backward between literal assertion and metaphor, sadly for both what triumphs in the bargain is dialectics.

It is not so evident why Armstrong chose in this book to concentrate on the fundamentalist elements of three monotheistic religions -- Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The extremist elements of a polytheistic religion like Hinduism poses a threat to world peace as much as do the other three. Fissures in other religions are beginning to appear as well. That's more fodder for Karen Armstrong. But reading a moderate theologician's appraisal of her radical rivals is like having a boiling icecream. With vainglorious statements like "To prevent an escalation of the conflict, we must try and understand the pain and perception of the other side," she describes fundamentalists as products of the same modernity from which they are trying to shield their religions. Armstrong is obsessed with the idea of modernity, and uses it more as a token to lunge at fundamentalists.

For 30 years Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most acclaimed and widely read scientists of the twentieth century, bridged the gap between science and the mass culture through his monthly essay column in Natural History magazine. The end of the century will also dawn the end of Gould's tenure. As the subtitle of his ninth collection of essays indicates, the next compilation will be his last. Gould is the Alexander Agassiz professor of zoology and professor of geology at Harvard and the curator for invertebrate palaeontology in the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

In the preface to this fascinating compilation of essays, Gould says, "I have struggled, harder and more explicitly than for anything else in my life as a writer, to develop a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography -- and to do so not by the factual chronology of a life's sorrows and accomplishments (a noble taste requiring the amplitude of a full book) but rather by the intellectual synergy between a person and the controlling ideas of his life." The articles have been written from the biographical perspective once again, a key feature in Gould's writings.

In his earlier books, Gould had written extensively about palaeontological freaks and oddities. As his innings draws to a close, he becomes more focussed on the intellectual history of science, or rather the history of natural history. These essays deal with the evolution of key concepts in the history of science, showing in every case that the accepted textbook accounts of their development are at the least over-simplifications, at worst downright falsifications resulting from misunderstanding, prejudice or even malice.

The first group of essays treats the most absorbing period in Gould's own subject, palaeontology -- the premodern struggle (from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century) to understand the origin of fossils while nascent science grappled with the deepest of all questions about the nature of both causality and reality. Are fossils the remains of ancient organisms on an old earth, or manifestations of a stable and universal order, symbolically expressed by correspondences among nature's three kingdoms -- animal, mineral, and vegetable?

The subsequent section discusses the greatest conjunction of a time, a subject, and an assemblage of amazing people in the history of natural history: the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century in France, when a group that included some of the most exceptional intellects of the time -- Georges Buffon, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck -- invented the scientific study of natural history in an age of revolution. In the third part, Gould illustrates the greatest British challenge to this continental preeminence: the remarkable, and wonderfully literate, leading lights of Victorian science in Charles Darwin's age of turmoil and reassessment: Lyell's uniformitarianism, Darwin's own intellectual development, Richard Owen's theory about the extinction of dinosaurs, and Alfred Russel Wallace on Victorian certainties and subsequent unpredictabilities.

While the last three parts do not invoke biography explicitly, they use the same device of embodying an abstraction within a particular context that can be addressed in detail and immediate focus to fit within an essay. The interlude of the fourth part presents some experiments in the different literary form of short takes. The fifth section, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit social consequences (and often unacknowledged social origins as well), also uses biography, but in a different way, to link past stories with present realities -- to convey the lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery often replay episodes buried in history, and prove that our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities of social context and mental blockage. The last cluster of essays abandons biography for another device of essayists: major themes (about evolution's different expression across scales of size and time) cast into the epitome of odd and intriguing particulars.

Here is a man who plays his cards well. It is not common to find publication of autobiographies of presidents-elect coinciding with the inauguration of the man as his country's president. But if the man in question is one 47-year-old Vladimir Putin, a former agent of the dreaded KGB, one should not be surprised how and why he made good use of the forthcoming book by having excerpts published in the Moscow daily Kommersant just when the country went to the polls in March this year. Putin justified his billing as the favourite and his book was well on its way to becoming a bestseller. For a man who, till the other day, was barely known outside his own circles, Putin had done well.

First Person is a rather unconventional autobiography -- it is not a first person account of his life written in his own words. It is a product of six interviews of four hours each conducted by three Russian journalists -- Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova and Andrei Kolesnikov -- and translated from the Russian by Catherine Fitzpatrick. The entire exercise is a well-crafted one and the outcome seems to be a fait accompli: Putin is clean and Putin is human. One should not expect anything less than a well-planned, result-oriented public relations exercise by a man was paid to be crafty by the old Soviet system. Till the other day no one knew much about Putin; now a substantial lot does. He is not the only one to be interviewed in the book: the journalists interviewed his wife and two daughters, his schoolteacher and friends from St Petersburg (Leningrad when Putin was born there).

Putin was still in his teens when the Soviet film 'The Sword and the Shield', about a Soviet double agent in Nazi Germany, inspired him to become a KGB agent. "To find out how to become a spy, sometime back around the beginning of the ninth grade, I had gone to the office of the KGB directorate." He was told that would be possible only after suitable higher education, preferably law school. Putin went all out to make it to the law school in Leningrad University. His first career move had paid off. He remained untouched by the currents of liberalism that were running through the Soviet Union during that time. Neither did he care much for the Stalinist purges and resultant public resentment. "To be honest, I didn't think about it at all. Not one bit... My notion of the KGB. came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education."

Putin says he did not get much of a chance to play the cloak and dagger stuff. His last assignment of note was at the Dresden office of the KGB from 1985 to early 1990 just after the Berlin Wall came crumbling down. The Dresden building also housed the headquarters of the East German secret police. So when irate crowds attacked the building, Putin asked the nearest Soviet military command for help only to be told, "We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent." The help did come, but the words "Moscow is silent" kept ringing in his ears. It was as if the death knell had been sounded. What does he have to say about the hasty Soviet exit from Eastern Europe? Putin says at a later stage, "Frankly, to this day I don't understand why (Mikhail) Gorbachev did that. We would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit." But he does not support the Soviet leadership for the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War: "These were major mistakes. And the Russophobia that we see in Eastern Europe today is the fruit of those mistakes."

Putin is clearly not a man who suffers from complexes because of his KGB past. He recently ordered the restoration of a monument to Yuri Andropov at the headquarters of the FSB (Federal Security Service, modern-day version of the KGB) in the famous old building on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. "You can't get anywhere without secret agents." So, in spite of the interviews might he still have some secrets to be revealed later? With Putin you never know.