On Call
Anthony Fauci
Penguin Random House
Pp 672
Anthony Fauci is arguably the most famous and revered doctor in the world today. He became a beacon of hope for millions through the Covid-19 pandemic, and whose
six-decade career in high-level public service put him in the room with seven presidents. His memoir reaches back to his boyhood in Brooklyn, New York, and carries through decades of caring for critically ill patients, navigating the whirlpools of Washington politics.
Tilak
Vaibhav Purandare
Penguin Random House
Pp 480, Rs. 999
Hailed as ‘Lokmanya’ or the ‘one revered by the people,’ Bal Gangadhar Tilak transformed India’s fight for freedom from polite discourse to a mass uprising. His fierce writings, relentless activism, and controversial stances earned him the title ‘enemy of the British government’ from the Raj, which saw him as its greatest threat. This biography traces Tilak’s journey from his early days in Konkan to his influential role across India, among others.
The Plot To Save South Africa
Justice Malala
Simon & Schuster
Pp 352, Rs. 599
Johannesburg, 1993. Nelson Mandela has been free for three years and is in slow-moving power—sharing talks with President FW de Klerk when a white supremacist shoots Mandela’s heir apparent, Chris Hani, in the hope of igniting a civil war. Will he succeed in plunging South Africa into chaos, safeguarding apartheid for perhaps years to come? Or can Mandela and de Klerk overcome their differences, plotting a way forward?
The Company of Violent Men
Siddharthya Roy
Penguin Random House
Pp 288, Rs. 599
Investigative journalist Siddharthya Roy takes us on a deeply personal journey into reporting violent political conflicts in South Asia. From the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, where drugs and human trafficking run rampant, to the forests of Chhattisgarh, where Maoist rebels and the Centre have waged a war for half a century, Roy narrates the cycles of brutality, exploitation and injustice in which everyday people are caught.
One Medicine
Dr Matt Morgan
Simon & Schuster
Pp 288, Rs. 499
As Dr Matt Morgan, an intensive care consultant, examined a patient who had suffered a cardiac arrest after inhaling some biscuit crumbs, he saw a flock of birds fly past the window. “They must inhale objects all the time when flying, how do they survive?” he thought to himself. This began an investigation that spanned continents, species and millennia. We owe animals so much, it’s time to focus on examining how they live and what we still have to learn from them.