Sunday, February 28, 2010

Testing Management Skills: Six Tests to Assess Management and Leadership Skills

Testing Management Skills: Six Tests to Assess Management and Leadership Skills

This book consists of six amazing tests designed to identify particular management styles. I will recommend this book to anyone interested in management, management development. Book is also equally beneficial for people in the management. Book can be use in planning for professional development, recruitment selection or team-building workshops.


Download the book here for free

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Confessions of a Gynecologist

Dodd Robbins tells the story of the development and life of an Obstetrician and Gynecologist. He describes, in action packed and juicy detail, the obstacles, the conflicts, and the exciting adventures that he experiences along his life’s path.
He exposes his own weaknesses and flaws and revels in his special successes. He bears his soul in the exposure of his own desires and needs and how they effected his life’s choices, including a revealing and delicate foray into the subconscious motivations that might cause physicians to choose the specialty of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He holds nothing back in exposing his personal life and his need for affection and love. In the end, he takes us on an exciting voyage of a solid but flawed human being, seen with his eyes, through the delicate, intricate and complicated world of an Obstetrician and Gynecologist.

Book is available online at the cost of $25.00.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Eleven Thousand Rods in 1999

SOME EUROPEAN SYMBOLISM IN TURKEY

If yesterday marked the 21st anniversary of the fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, Tuesday saw the European Court of Human Rights defend a convicted Turkish publisher for publishing Guillaume Apollinaire’s classic erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods in 1999.

Contraband in Turkey, the novel was banned in France till 1970 for it’s story of an aristocrat on a turn-of-the-century lust-filled road trip. Luckily, since Apollinaire died in 1918, no one has called for his death.

Monday, February 22, 2010

The Happy Associate - free download

The Happy Associate (Tranquebar, Rs. 150) is the book we should scratch each other’s eye out to get our hands on. It’s vicious, hilarious take on Delhi and it’s hair-gelled, paneer sushi-munching denizens. Author Urja has taken an electric snapshot of middle-class Dilliwallas through the eyes of Kirti a.k.a. underdog(“When I first overhead it. I told myself that it sounded cool. Like an American rapper’s name.”). our hero is a “twenty-six-year-old dude, fair-skinned and slender” who is an associate in a Delhi accounting firm(“the kind of firm with expensive sculptures, girls in suit-boot, and tax deals in billions”). He’s a small-town guy with roots “in a bright bowl of north India where the holy tulsi grows” with big city aspirations. Kirti’s life is all about manoeuvring through office parties, games of Scrabble, speaking bad Hindi( “this makes them assume that I am so comfortable with English, that I am shaky with Hindi”) – and impressing Mandira Rastogi. Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho-meets-Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!

Energy Efficiency And Climate Change - Book download

Let’s get energizedWith the fumes of Copenhagen Climate Change summit still in the air, quite a slew of books on environment have reached the bookshelves. This one looks at one of the key aspects of the debate on global warming: energy efficiency and its role in development and enhancing the environment.

What makes this book attractive is that it begins with the story of how it all began: the misuse and overuse of resources. It then moves on to tackling what can be done now to save whatever is left. There is also an ‘independent assessment” of the arguments and theories that are doing the rounds on climate change in terms of causes, outcomes, mitigation and policies.

For those who are new to this world buzzing with climate jargon and theories, read the first chapter. It dissects the issue of energy efficiency well. It’ll help new converts understand the basic issue of how energy efficiency links up with larger national goals such as poverty alleviation, environment degradation and green house gas emissions.

While the preference traces the beginnings of industrialisation and where the world went wrong, the following chapters take the readers through inter-relations among the environment, energy and economy, the climate, market-based measures as means to unfold climate change mitigation, commericalisation of clean technology and the role of institutions in promoting energy efficiency.

Since clean technologies is what everybody is talking about these days, the chapter on what it takes to commericalisegreen technologies will be of particular interest.

A handy book, the rather bladly titled Energy Efficiency And Climate Change has the strength to draw in a wider range of readers and not only get academics and policy wonks to nose their way through the chapters. Having said that, a line on the book cover: I am yet to fathom what the picture is all about. Couldn’t it have been made a little more interesting? After all, isn’t this the right time to get readers interested in – as some wag put it – hot air?

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Menopausal Palestine by Suad Amiry

Suad Amiry, author of the Menopausal Palestine wrote her first book "Sharon and My Mother in Law" in her 50s. In her book Suad tells about her sroties of loss of Palestine through her characters., she also recall the social history of her country through the stories of unusual group called Committee of Ramallah Independent Menopausal enterprise (CRIME). The setting is a cafe and time is a day before hamsa sweeps the 2006 election in Gaza.


In some parts of the books author also mentiones about babies, wedding nights and eventually topics remains Hamas. Also opposing tto tha Fatwah of Hamsa for all womens to wear HIJAB (veil), Suad says if she's forced to wear hijab she will design the sexies hijab in the world.


As an overall review of the book, Suad used a styles of being singular and uses humour and everyday experinces of life in Palestine.

The Quarantine Papers - MUMBAI TERI JAAN-

CITY BLIGHTS The story of a plague, riots, the Oak family and a metropolis

If The Quarantine Papers by Kalpish Ratna has a major flaw, it’s this: it turns you into an anti-social element.

I foolishly began reading it on a Thursday evening. The next day, I deeply resented the need to go to the office, deeply resented having to go out for a drink, deeply resented everyone who phoned me, deeply resented everything that kept me away from the book.

Naturally, this made my work and relationships hell for a while, but it did bring some sunshine into a couple of people’s lives. Namely Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, surgeons, writers and the two halves of the duo that comprise the pseudonymous writer, Kalpish Ratna. “It vindicates us as authors of the book,” says Sayed.

Why The Quarantine Papers should require vindication is beyond me. It is a gripping, highly textured, very solid novel that had drawn me wholesale into its world(s) and even now, three weeks since I finished the book, I hate being away from it.

Briefly, The Quarantine Papers glides smoothly between the Bombay of December 1992 when the Babri Masjid was torn and communal passions ran high, as lived by one Ratan Oak, a microbiologist, and the Bombay of 1896, when the plague swept through the city and intensified communal hatreds, as lived by Ratan’s great-grandfather, Ramratan Oak, a mortician. But so much is packed into the book that you could get quite breathless. For instance, Ratan Oak learns that he’s not only Ratan Oak. He’s also Ramratan Oak, his great-grandfather. And he’s part of a pact between people from several communities, a pact to stop hate.

Then there’s the brilliant sarcasm(ooh, it is lovely) that shows how colonial rule in India was not the happy Raj party that the British would have the world(and us) believe it was. There are fascinating passages on the development of medicine in India and the world. And there are relationships to sort out-between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and friends.

But where did the idea to tie the plague of 1896 with the communal tensions of 1992 come from? “Well, we’d always wanted to write on Bombay and on the history of medicine, and that’s what this is,” says Sayed. Adds Swaminathan: “When we researched a non-fiction book on the plague (Uncertain Life and Sure Death: Medicine and Mahamaari in Maritime Mumbai), and we came across so much rich material in the state archives, we knew we had our book.”

And a little help from a newspaper reporter who covered the communal carnage of December 1992, and you learn that the only truly fictional elements in The Quarantine Papers are Ratan and Ramratan Oak(But we’ve lived with them in our heads for years,” says Swaminathan) and the conversations between the characters, most of whom were real people.

The obvious theme of the book is communal hatred. That makes Kalpish Ratna very angry. “ Where is the anger of the common citizen,” wonders Sayed. “Have we haveless 9/11s in India than anywhere else? Why is what’s happening in our city happening? Who’s going to talk about this?”

But equally important for the writers is the need to change mindsets with regard to India and the world of the Whites. “Many aspects of history are so coloured with White no one gives a damn for the truth,” says Sayed.

“The voice of the native is always forgotten.”

“For instance,” explains Swaminathan, “Any standard medical text on cholera-including those that are taught in our colleges-will open with a map of shipping routes. It’d tell you there were seven pandemics of cholera in so many years, and it’d give you the number of mortalities in each. But no text would tell you that in the same period discussed in the text,23 million people died of cholera in India. The narrative of any disease has always been from a western prespective.”

But Kalpish Ratna aim to bring us these “forgotten Indian lives”. “It’s all there, all first person accounts, all archived,” says Swaminathan. When the sequel(s) to The Quarantine Papers are published (“We have 10 plots,” chukles Syed) hopefully, we’ll find ourselves. And hopefully, we’ll find ten more great books.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

FreeFall by Joseph Stiglitz

Freefall is a book on finanical crisis which whole world is facing now. Writeen by nobel proze winner Joseph Stiglitz, this is a book I'll definitely recommend to all. Freefall is a book on the crash of the global markets which was led by bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.