Effective ways to manage people
Meeta Rajivlochan
The Human Side of Enterprise
by Douglas McGregor, Tata McGraw Hill, Delhi. Pages 423. Rs 395.
IN our normal lives, we know intuitively that people respond best to us if we appeal to their better instincts, whether to their desire to achieve or to a desire to be friendly or even to merely look good. Most people routinely try to establish some non-monetary basis to their relationships including that with the neighbourhood shopkeeper if only in an effort to ensure that they do not get cheated.

The ground beneath reforms
J. Sri Raman
India’s Economy: A Journey in Time and Space
Ed. Raj Kapila and Uma Kapila, Academic Foundation. Pages 390. Rs 795.
TIME was when matters economic seemed more concrete than most other things in the world. Economic growth, for example, appeared something more visible and measurable than, say, political liberty or social justice. No longer, alas. The economic boom, which our leaders and media luminaries never tire of celebrating, appears an entirely remote abstraction to many lay people.

American disasters loom large at book awards
Paul Lieberman
WORKS set in the American West and Midwest recently won major prizes at the 2006 National Book Awards, in a year when both the fiction and nonfiction categories included two nominees inspired by the terrorist attacks of September 11 or its aftermath. The non-fiction prize went to Timothy Egan for his look back at an earlier American crisis, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, published by Houghton Mifflin.

Stories that a sleepy village tells
Himmat Singh Gill
Shaya Tales
Bulbul Sharma, Penguin Books Pages 165. Rs 200.
SHAYA is a sleepy little village in Himachal Pradesh where Bulbul Sharma and husband K.K own a small cottage, to which they retire when Delhi gets a bit too much for them. For company they have former diplomat T.K. Kaul who lives nearby, simple villagers like Bua, Thakur and the roof repairer, and of course all the birds, monkeys, butterflies, water snakes and any other form of nature living or non-living that Bulbul loves and cares for, and about which she often paints and writes about.

Rustic roots
Rajdeep Bains
Tales Once Told: Legends of Kerala
by Abraham Eraly. Penguin. Pages 280. Rs 200.
Kerala, even today, is viewed as "God’s own country", a romantic retreat from the vagaries of modern life. Abraham Eraly has, in addition, given us a view of the Kerala of the past, a simpler, more rustic world that is infinitely more romantic than what even the smartest travel brochures can advertise today.

Caste and its impact
B.S. Thaur
Essays on Caste in Modern India
by Dilip Menon. Navyana. Rs. 200. Pages 158.
IN this book is on casteism in the Indian society, the author has brought out the atrocities/discrimination perpetuated against the Dalits, adivasis and other subaltern classes by the so-called upper castes. The tales of olden days when Dalits were not allowed to listen to Vedic hymns, they had to wear tinkles before entering habitations of upper caste and slavery, untouchability and subordination, the triple curse, come alive in the book.

Power of love
Akanksha Bhalla
The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky
by Ken Dornstein Sceptre. Pages 355. £ 8.15
IF there was ever a story that proved beyond doubt that death could not do loved ones apart, then Ken Dornstein’s memoir of his dead brother could well be it. Many books have been written about the most transcendental of human emotions, love; but The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky talks about love to an extent when it hurts.

Canadian colours
Harsh Desai
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
by Margaret Atwood  Doubleday  Pages 225. $ 22
THE versatile Canadian author has a new book of short stories which could be described as Scenes from the lives of Nell and Tig—an unconventional Canadian couple. Trueman Capote in The Paris Review Interviews says that when properly explored the short story is the most disciplined and difficult form of prose writing but I do not think that that is the reason that one feels more satisfied by the longer works of authors like Atwood—rather the reason seems to be that at the end of a book of short stories one wants more.

PUNJABI REVIEW
Delightful journey
Surinder Singh Tej

• Sahitik Sawejiwani
  by Gulzar Singh Sandhu Publications Bureau, Punjabi University, Patiala. Pages 154. Rs. 160
  

• Pehla Din
  by S. Saki Vartman Prakashan, New Delhi. Pages 152 Rs. 150
  

SHORT TAKES
Stories from two extremes
Randeep Wadehra

• Women heroes and Dalit assertion in North India
  by Badri Narayan. Sage. Pages 186. Rs 295
  

• The life and times of the Nawabs of Lucknow
  by Ravi Bhatt. Rupa. Pages 245. Rs 295
  

• Lahore Darbar and Rani Jindan
  by Avtar Singh Gill Jaswant Printers, Ludhiana. Pages 272. Rs 250.
  

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