“Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb.”
November 15, 1959 turned out to be a bizarre day in the lives of the good people of Holcomb - a small, closely knit, god-fearing town located in the west of Kansas State. Comprising principally of blue-collar, middle-class American citizens [...]

Not surprisingly, the most obvious theme running through David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers is conflict, however; it’s not the obvious conflict of the Iraq War as a whole. Instead, Finkel focuses on the internal conflict within the soldiers fighting the war on the ground and on the Iraqi citizens of Rustamiyah trying to find [...]

If one thing can be gleaned from Tom Folsom’s The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld, it’s that they certainly didn’t call Joe Gallo “Crazy Joe” for nothing. In many ways, he was a textbook example of a juvenile delinquent turned complete sociopath. Crazy Joe robbed, killed, [...]

Barely 45 percent of voters in India’s financial and entertainment capital, Mumbai exercised their right to vote in this year’s General Elections – a number lower than that in most parts of rural and urban India. The people of the city were heavily criticized for their “don’t give a damn” attitude - What happened to [...]

They say experience is the best teacher. And a teacher who says that must have seen a lot in her life. Sudha Murty’s Wise and Otherwise: A Salute to Life (Revised Edition, Penguin Books) is a collection of 51 stories all narrating her experience with various kinds of people she meets during her philanthropic work [...]