By David Hone

The Tyrannosaur Chronicles is a comprehensive account of the largest and most famous dinosaurs to walk the earth, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. David Hone takes you on a journey dating back several million years to an era when these mystical creatures presumably lived. The book is accompanied by evidences and calculated assumptions. It doesn’t totally dispel all the images you might have after watching Jurassic Park, but provides thorough explanations as to what the real deal was. The book presents published scientific studies to present an exhaustive and highly informative overview beginning from where dinosaurs came from, evolutionary characteristics, metabolism, morphology, anatomy, ecology and physiology.


Reviewed by: Juhi Arora
By Ruskin Bond

The White Tiger And Other Stories is a completely different book. It is a collection of spooky, scary tales compiled by Ruskin Bond. If you are a coward, it’s best to read them in daylight or else… ‘The Men Tigers’, by Lt. Col. W.H. Sleeman is a curious tale on a belief in India that men are turned into tigers by eating a root and then how does one distinguish a real one from a mantiger? ‘The only difference between the two…is that the metamorphosed tiger has no tail, while the bora, or ordinary tiger, has a very long one.’ However, there is an antidote, another root, which can turn the tiger back into a man! And all this is said to have happened in Central India.


Reviewed by: Premola Ghosh
Richard Adams

Watership Down is an incredible book. It is the story of an epic journey of a small band of wild rabbits. Fiver, the prophet, predicts imminent destruction and, under the leadership of his brother Hazel, the rabbits leave the familiar security of their warren and brave the unknown countryside in search of a new home. Unconsciously, the reader slides into a completely new dimension, joins Hazel and his friends, sees the world through their eyes, smells the dangers, suffers the hardships and terrors till they reach the perfect home— Watership Down.


Reviewed by: Chitra Narayanan
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Once again in her latest novel, as in most of her earlier work, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala explores the situation of foreigners in India and what India does to them. But unlike her earlier work (seven novels and three collections of short stories), here for the first time she adds an extra dimension of time, going back to the past for the confirmation of a pattern that she had so far traced only in terms of contemporary India.


Reviewed by: Meenakshi Mukherjee
Ronald W. Clark

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 and died in 1970 at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. Mathematician, philosopher, pacifist during World War I, advocate of war on Russia soon after World War II, campaigner for nuclear disarmament towards the end of his life, and prolific writer on a variety of topics, Russell was a prominent figure among the intellectual elite of England for well over three quarters of a century. An intimate and detailed account of Russell’s multifaceted personality and his achievements is now available in the book by Ronald Clark, biographer of Einstein, J.B.S.Haldane, the Huxleys and Tizard.


Reviewed by: K.R. Acharya
H.K. Paranjape & V.A. Pai Panandikar

The survey induces sadness at what appears to be a near total lack of (a) research into the more fundamental issues of public administration, (b) depth and penetration in such studies as have been made or come to notice. The presentations are competent but do not appear to have escaped the temptation to highlight the fashion to berate the bureaucracy for its alleged ‘dysfunctional’ nature.


Reviewed by: T.C.A. Ramanuja Chari