100 Books Like Bottle of Lies

I think most investigative journalists aim to be as good as Kevin Donovan.

This creepy double murder of a billionaire drug company founder and his wife is still unsolved and the investigation was botched from the start. Donovan’s knowledge of the case and discovery of more potential suspects and witnesses boggle the mind. It’s not surprising that police are now following Donovan’s leads. 

I absolutely loved the simplicity and clarity of this approach.

It’s almost the opposite end of the spectrum to my first selection and a method that I found more and more common over the years of my career: checklists and flowcharts for the serious and frequent presentations in the Emergency Department, in the operating theatre, and at Triage. And Gawande was right: they did and do save lives.

More generally, I used this process all the time when I was training other staff in my posts with Doctors Without Borders. Preventing and avoiding problems with fail-safe systems is so much better than trying to solve them after they occur!

It is a book on the history of modern India but told from the perspective of an entrepreneur and a business leader – and one of the architects of the IT revolution. It tells the story of ideas that dotted India’s transition from the era of socialism to that of liberalization and globalization, while highlighting successes and failures. It projects new ideas – technological as well as creative policy options - for meeting some of the pressing challenges of poverty, health, education, and economic growth. 

Few know that thousands of villagers from India were shipped to various colonies as indentured laborers after slavery ended in Britain’s territories.

Lured by promises of rich earnings they could send home, they replaced slaves and worked in similar conditions of hardship. In South Africa’s Colony of Natal, Indian indentured laborers did backbreaking work on sugar plantations, and their stories have seldom been told. In particular, no one has revealed the hidden stories of women plantation workers. In this heartbreaking yet lyrical novel, Joanne Joseph (tracing her own grandmother’s history) breaks the mold with her story of Shanti, who runs away from an arranged marriage and finds herself apparently powerless in a foreign land. How she indeed exercises her will, forges friendships, and finds love and peace makes for a riveting story.

At first glance, it seems like a rather unexciting book, to be honest. But it is enough to look at the table of contents to see that the author argues that one of the basic and oldest manuals of Indian architecture had borrowed whole sections from the best manual we have on Roman (that is, Greco-Roman) architecture: the book of Vitruvius.

I was shocked the first time I read it. This is another of the great enigmas of the subject: how is it that this text is hidden and the consequences of such massive borrowing are not brought out?

As the great Asian renaissance gathers momentum in the 21st century, many young Asians will begin to rediscover their own cultures and civilizations, just as the West did in its first cultural renaissance in the 15th century. Few understand classical Indian civilization as well as Amartya Sen does.

Since Asian cultures are associated with despotism and Western cultures with individual liberties, Sen says, “The claim that the basic ideas underlying freedom and tolerance have been central to Western culture over the millennia and are somehow alien to Asia is, I believe, entirely rejectable.” Living up to the spirit of the title of his book, Sen demonstrates in this book that he’s an argumentative Indian and Asian. Argumentative Asians will eventually win the argument with the West. 

This book examines the function and representation of religion in Indian cinema and demonstrates that the interplay between the modern and the traditional in modern India is a natural aspect of daily existence. It discusses India's various cinemas while focusing on Bollywood, the Hindi film industry in Mumbai.

The devotional genre, which peaked during the height of the nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, the mythological genre, which carries on India's long tradition of retelling Hindu myths and legends by drawing from sources like the national epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and Bombay-produced films that portray India's Islamicate culture, including historical, courtesan, and "Muslim social" genres, are all covered in Rachel Dwyer's engaging conversation.

If you are interested in the history of the Indian stock market, then this book is a must-read for you. Written in an easy-to-understand language, the book will take you on an exciting journey from the early days of the Bombay Stock Exchange, narrating all major episodes and players with learnings that can help you to navigate in the Indian Stock Market.

I love Rumer Godden’s novels, but I’m even fonder of her memoirs, especially this one. Writing with her sister, Jon, she describes life in Naryangang (then in British India, now in Bangla Desh) during and shortly after World War 1. The large household, the bazaar, the diversity of people, the bright sun and the monsoon rains, the wealth and the poverty, the danger of rabid dogs, the holidays in hill stations…I grew up in India forty years after Jon and Rumer Godden, but in many ways, their experiences bring back my own childhood.

This book is a riveting exploration of the major goddess festival in India, Navaratri, and a follow-up volume of the popular Nine Nights of the Goddess.

I love this book because it dives into the regional diversity of the festival, taking me on a journey into the many ways that the goddess is celebrated throughout India and into the lives of her devotees. What I find so mesmerizing about Nine Nights of Power is the balance between breadth and depth that gives me a flavor of the diversity of the traditions with deep dives into the individual case studies.