King Crow by Jennifer Armstrong

King Crow, a picture book by Jennifer Armstrong, is a apt for the third grade students. King Crow is a fairy tale and the illustrations in this book are lush and dark. It's story of wise but vanquished King Cormac who has been blinded and placed in prison by his conqueror, King Bregant. Cormac is visited three times in prison by a crow who tells him just enough of what's going on outside to allow Cormac to seem to have magic knowledge.

The language in this picture book is haunting and there's a moral here, but not too heavily handled.

-Navtej Kohli

Rabbit's Gift By George Shannon and Laura Dronzek

The Rabbit's gift is one of the children books that I liked a lot and think it's worth sharing it on my Navtej Kohli Blog here.

Rabbit’s Gift by George Shannon is a modern retelling of the "giving" fable. The spirit of the original story is shown by the re-gifting of a turnip by a well-intentioned community of animals.

Through the eyes of the adorable forest creatures that are beautifully depicted by by Laura Dronzek, the reader sees that while he is not responsible for the happiness of others, his actions can deeply impact those he comes in contact with.

The book has a very easy conversational style of writing. It's logical flow of events, and the twist to the original story make this book a new classic. Shannon has done a good job in telling a complex story in a plain language that can be easily understood by children.

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

This story is about four beautiful girls who were born on a farm in Oja de Agua, Dominican Republic. Their names were Patria, Dede, Minerva, and Maria Theresa. They also had another name and sworn duty to get rid of the Dominican Republic dictator. Their code name was Las Mariposas, or the butterflies.

All the four girls go off to school for their education, where the revolutionary spark is ignited. Minerva is the first to embrace the idea of living in a free country. Her parents do not listen to her idea up until the Discovery Day Dance. They get out of the fix, and her father dies after only a few days at home.

After the school, the girls are all grown up and Trujillo is becoming more and more obsessive. One by one the girls and their families joined the revolutionary group started by Minerva and her husband. They went through rough times like jail, and house arrest and no friends. They believed in their cause and didn't give up when things got rough.

To know more about me read here Navtej Kohli on Friendster and Navtej Kohli on Youtube

Investigating the Russian Mafia by Joseph D. Serio

This is an important book as it tells us something about the state of affairs in Russia and gives insight into things popular history is content to pass over. Joe Serio lived in the former Soviet Union for seven years witnessing the country and culture form many different angles. He was the only American to work in the Organized crime Control Department of the Soviet police and has been a consultant to “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post,” CNN and the BBC. He also played harmonica in a Russian rock ‘n roll band.

This book is very comprehensive with footnotes and flow charts making it worth a read. It is divided into three parts. The first deals with the term “mafia” as applied to the Soviets, the nature and number of crime groups in that country, and the role of the media. Part two examines key issues in the rise of criminal organizations and gives some perspective from the past 400 years that helps us understand the long-term context of the problem. Part three takes a close look at criminal organizations, business, and law enforcement—three spheres inextricably linked in a struggle for power in Russia.

I don’t know what that means for businesses, tourists, and even governments who now interact with that part of the world, but comprehending the past, understanding the larger context of existing problems and appreciating the things that keep us in ignorance of one another, is a start.

Navtej Kohli

Katrina and the Lost City of New Orleans by Rod Amis

This is a story of Rod Amis and the time when Katrina hurricane hit New Orleans. Rod Amis is a bartender in New Orleans, in and around the French Quarter in the years before hurricane Katrina devastates the city. As Katrina hits his city and he frantically looks for his friends, he is both saddened, outraged and anxious.

He is saddened by the destruction of the city. He is outraged by the slow reaction of his country to devastation in New Orleans and the "surprise" about New Orleans that the news media and government officials express."

by Navtej Kohli

Churchill: The Unexpected Hero

This book is part of the Oxford University Press' Lives and Legacies series. It is a very short book about Winston Churchill, an extremely famous British Prime Minister. Even though the book is short, it does a good job of detailing Churchill's long career.

The author's central theme revolves around the fact that Churchill's huge ego was both his greatest flaw and his greatest strength. He was a genius, but he sometimes made bad choices because he never asked other people for advice. For example, during World War I he made the disastrous decision to try to invade Turkey through the Dardanelle Straits. The failure of the operation led to the death of 46,000 allied soldiers at the battle of Gallipoli.

During World War II he redeemed himself. His strong stand against appeasement was key to defeating the Nazis. After World War II, Churchill coined the phrase the "Iron Curtain".

by Navtej Kohli. Read more about Navtej Kohli and his biography collection here.

The Millionaire Mind by Thomas Stanley

Thomas J. Stanley, a Ph.D. has written a revolutionary book aimed at those who desire economic success. A high IQ isn't mandatory for monetary success. Many millionaires's SAT scores were not in the top percentile, however their ambitious drive excelled them forward into success. The book explains action and thought processes utilized by millionaires. It allows one to discover pertinent factors along with great perspectives into the millionaire's mind and chosen vocation.

This educated author profiled characteristics of 773 millionaires who accumulated wealth and have relatively small or no outstanding credit balances. He compiled demographic data and used his methodology to break down common factors amongst millionaires.

You will learn about many lucrative ways to enhance an economically productive life and live in financial independence. This book offers entrepreneurial optimism to all those in business.

Read more stories and business information by Navtej Kohli on his business blog. Also know more about Navtej Kohli and his public profile on Associated Content.

Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Navtej Kohli gives another review of a very light and well written book by Wolff. In this new collection, Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff is more often than not begin by catching people in what seem to be mundane, routine positions. The start of the stories begins with the story "My friend Clark and I had decided to build a jet plane,". "They were doing the dishes, his wife washing as he dried," begins another. "On her thirtieth birthday, Ted threw a surprise party for Helen." In openings that deftly infer an ordinary world around them, Wolff’s lights come up on familiar people, in familiar places: They live in small towns on the West Coast. They are stuck driving somewhere they do not want to go. They are doing cocaine for a friend’s birthday. They are going hunting. They are building an airplane with a new friend but stop to visit an old one. They are driving cross-country to try to start a new life. It is Wolff’s gift to enter these worlds in a plainspoken way, one that seems matter of fact, but nonetheless determines a great deal quickly.

Take the sentences with which Wolff’s entire collection launches: "When she was young, Mary saw a brilliant and original man lose his job because he had expressed ideas that were offensive to the trustees of the college where they both taught. She shared his views but did not sign the petition. She was, after all, on trial herself -- as a teacher, as a woman, as an interpreter of history."

The next story, "Hunters in the Snow," plays with the forces that imbue a similar constellation -- fear, power, loyalty, being trapped -- in the relationship among three friends out deer hunting.

It is the everyday quality of the ingredients and recipes that makes these stories great. Each tale is delivered in spare, precise prose, and many return us to the spectacle of small slights, subtle cruelties -- that in turn lead one character to hurt herself or another to abandon someone he once said he would love. It is a very good bedtime read story.

101 Sonnets by Don Paterson

101 Sonnets is a collection of sonnets from hundred and one different poets, with an informative introduction and interesting piece of commentary. In the introduction part Paterson describes the history of sonnet and some of its commonly known structures, metres, and rhyme schemes: most familiarly a "turn" between an eight line octet and a six line sestet, iambic pentameter, and Italian (ABBAABBA CDCDCD) or English (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) rhymes. There are many alternatives to these, however, and Paterson argues that strict definitions of a sonnet are unworkable — "the only qualification for entry in this book is that the poem should have fourteen lines" (and one fails even that).

Many of the selections he has considred are unsurprising — poets such as Donne, Keats, Yeats and Dickinson as well as Shakespeare and Heaney — but many less familiar ones are also included. The sonnets themselves are arranged thematically rather than chronologically or alphabetically. All are properly organized by indices.

Eighteen pages of endnotes offer short paragraph comments on each poem, providing snippets of background and context and touching on issues of form or style. These are thought-provoking — just enough to make one stop and think without ever being obscure or pretentious. End note this book is a very good collection and a must read.

More information on Navtej Kohli | public profile of Navtej Kohli

Racial Theories by Michael Banton

Racial Theories is a book that talks about historical and typological overview of academic theories of race. The author Michael Banton touches on the critical issues such as ethnicity and discrimination. It consists many racial theories and would be of interest to a person who has a liking for this topic.

Banton begins with some general terminological issues, such as differences between folk and analytical terms and alternatives to "race". In "Race as Lineage" he then covers early modern concepts of race, based on the creation stories in Genesis and then on the work of naturalists such as Linnaeus and the German naturphilosophie school. Cuvier's confusion of lineage and variety provides a bridge to "Race as Type", where Banton sketches the theories of writers such as Morton and Nott in the United States, Gobineau in France, Smith and Knox in Britain, and Vogt in Germany.

Darwinian population thinking and the rejection of essentialism took some time to influence racial theories. "Race as Subspecies" describes early applications in the theories of Beddoe and Sumner, Park's social ecology, and some general issues with reductionist explanations. It was not till the modern evolutionary synthesis brought a more sophisticated understanding of human genetic variation that the need for a biological concept of race disappeared entirely.

The final chapter presents Banton's own ideas on how to build a "bottom up" theory of race. He argues that race should be considered a social construct within broader theories of group and category construction: socialisation, individual choice, political mobilisation, ethnicity, and nationalism. And he suggests that race will eventually be replaced as a social concept in the same kind of way it was made redundant as a biological one.

Read more theories and collection of biographies by Navtej Kohli. Also get to know more about Navtej Kohli here.

MacGregor Tells the World by Elizabeth McKenzie

MacGregor West is a complete lost soul—eternally between jobs, nursing latent abandonment issues, sponging off his cousin while deciding what happens next in life. When his aunt sends him a shoe box filled with his deceased mother’s memorabilia, he notices that a stack of empty envelopes inside that box bear a San Francisco return address of his mother.

After getting these new clues to the mysterious past, he finds the address. There, at the mansion, instead of answers he finds Carolyn Ware. Both of them get infatuated at the first sight. Carolyn, daughter of literary legend Charles Ware, can confirm the envelopes are her father’s stationery, but can’t comment on their significance. The ensuing love affair between Mac and Carolyn provides greater opportunity for Mac to get to know the Ware family, yet the deeper he probes into a possible correlation between his mother and them, the more elusive both Carolyn and answers become. A poster affixed to Carolyn’s wall that Mac’s mother once designed; a photo of Charles and his famed publishing friend with Mac’s mother in the periphery—these reveal a complicity beneath the family’s elegant, wealthy exterior that they all seem determined to hide.

MacGregor, a gifted short story writer, can create a sense of place in just a few lines. It’s pure pleasure to read a writer who not only get her details correct but chooses such evocative, accessible language to paint a picture, such as when Mac nostalgically surveys his cousin’s Redwood City backyard.

Navtej Kohli Profile on Associated Content & Navtej Kohli, CEO of Granox

I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio by Jean Feraca

Most of us who listen to Wisconsin Public Radio has, at some point of time, heard the voice of Jean Feraca. As host of WPR's "Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders," she is advocate and educator, an expert at mixing international issues with culture and aesthetics. An example of the program's diversity can be seen in any random week's schedule.

Now, Feraca has turned her craft on herself with "I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio." She traces her own life and craft through a collection of personal vignettes, retrospectives that consider the people who have shaped her and her journey to become a writer. The end result is a vivid, often haunting autobiography that unites a fascinating life with a voice gifted enough to provide all the details.

Feraca's life is as diverse as the selections of her program - growing up in an Italian-American New York family, courtship in a monastery, a Jewish wedding in a nightgown, poetic rebirth in Italy with a sick child. She skims over her messy divorces and personal loneliness in favor of the epiphanies that saved her, concerned with the positives and the process. Readers are also treated to the aesthetic side of Feraca's work: the book is peppered with asides such as a commentary on California wine, tips on writing poetry and a report on South American tribes.

The book is written in a style that is expected from someone with so much of experience in public radio, a calm and literate voice which feels like it can nurture and inform on any topic.

Her writing's potency is also attributed to the characters she writes about, practically forces of nature in their own right. These include a brother who holds Sitting Bull and Mussolini in equal regard, a mother whose mind is rapidly deteriorating but exerts a manic energy, a poetry teacher more comparable to a master craftsman and an aunt consisting of ethereal sweetness. There is a mix of frustration at how difficult growing up with these people was, tempered with a wistful gratitude at being able to grow up with them.

Although she listens too closely in some cases - the last chapter on marriage and God feels almost thick after a glorious odyssey to an Amazon clinic - "I Hear Voices" is a memoir worth reading in depth, both for its burnished prose and the startling life it recounts. Feraca's life is as much a story as any of her show's topics, and deserves equal time and attention.

Navtej Kohli Sports News and Updates and Navtej Kohli Medical Updates

Standing Stones by Jean-Pierre Mohen

Navtej Kohli Shares another book review of a very popular book.
Standing Stones combines great photographs with a short but informative overview of megaliths, covering their place in prehistory, history, and folklore and myth. Mohen begins with megaliths in legend, touching on pagan, Christian, and romantic views of megaliths, and their emergence in pseudohistory.

"The Druidism that Stukeley invented is a completely original idea. It has nothing to do with the actual Druids, Gallic priests known to Caesar in the 1st century BC — and was created a full millennium and a half after the last ceremonial use of the megaliths."
He traces the rise of antiquarian and scholarly interest in megaliths, and the development of broader public attention.

"Interest in megaliths spread from experts to the public as picture postcards were produced; they were especially popular around the year 1900."
He gives a brief history of the forms of megaliths over three thousand years.

The final section of the book, named "Documents", contains excerpts from writings on the megaliths: William Stukeley on the origins of megaliths, Gustave Flaubert on the excesses of "Celtic archaeology", an extract from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Gerald Hawkins on Stonehenge's astronomical significance, Prosper Mérimée on the Gavrinis images, and Mohen himself on megalithic art and on modern attempts to move large blocks of stone.

This is all rather limited in depth, as most of Standing Stones is taken up by photographs. The bulk of these illustrate the text, but there are also ten separate double page photo sets, illustrating Mediterranean megaliths — "Statue-menhirs and the torres of Corsica and the Balearic Islands", "Sardinia's giant tombs", and "Temples and hypogea of Malta" — megalithic traditions outside Europe — "The megaliths of Senegal", "The stones of the Toradja", and "Tombs and gods of the Americas" — and megaliths in art — paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Johan Christian Dahl, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.

Standing Stones is a nicely put together volume in the best Thames and Hudson tradition. It has little about specific sites, even Stonehenge and Carnac, and is of no use as a guidebook, but it makes a lively and attractive introduction to the megaliths of western Europe.

Read more about Navtej Kohli

The Road to Omaha - Robert Ludlum

A former military commander, General Mackenzie Hawkins is back! In this excellent comedy thriller which would also make a rib-tickling movie, the Hawk (after having infiltrated an Indian tribe called the Wopotamis) goes to the US Supreme Court by claiming back the state of Nebraska on behalf of the Wopotamis! How does he manage? A protocol from 1878 found in a dusty archive. Armed with evidence the hawk transforms himself into Chief Thunderhead. As he hatches his devious plan, his old adversary is back, lawyer Sam Deveraux. With the assistance of Jennifer Redwing, a Native American, and assorted colleagues, they do all they can to stop the Hawk once again before he threatens national security - remember Strategic Air Command is on the land the Wopotamis want back! And so the hilarity begins.

Robert Ludlum is really a genius!

Navtej Kohli on Web | Rediff Blog of Navtej Kohli

Murder on the Marmora

After sailing on the maiden voyages of the Lusitania and Mauretania for the Cunard Shipping Company as in-house detectives, George Dillman and Genevieve now work for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. The story describes their sailing journey on the Marmora from England to Australia with a stop in Egypt. The purser on the ship Brian Kilhendry makes it clear to them that he has no use for them and thinks they are not needed as there is never crime on his ship.

Shortly after he makes that proclamation, a woman sailing alone is robbed of her jewelry and money while she is out of the cabin. Other robberies follow and the victims are all women traveling without a man to protect them. While the two detectives are trying to help the victims, a man is murdered but nothing is missing from the room. The man was very popular leaving Dillman and Genevieve desperate to find the criminals even if it puts them in danger.

Anyone who loves to sail the seven seas will want to read MURDER ON THE MARMORA, a picturesque who-done-it that will make readers want to go on a cruise. Although much of the book is concentrated on the mystery, Genevieve is kept busy trying to evade her ex-fiancé on board with his new bride and Dillman is trying to discourage a young woman from chasing after him. The surprise ending is just the icing on the cake for one of Conrad Allen's best voyage mysteries.

In a nut shell this book is worth a read.
More reviews and blogs of Navtej Kohli | Profile on Ziki of Navtej Kohli | Youtube Video on Navtej Kohli

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less

Jeffrey Archer comes up with yet another on the edge story. Small but very captivating.

With a deviousness born of long practice, Harvey Metcalfe, a Boston based master of deceit, stays behind the scenes and runs a stock scam involving some bogus petroleum shares at the London Stock Exchange. After the scam folds, Harvey happily goes away a million dollars richer and leaves behind four stupified men, the unwitting principal buyers, teetering on the edge of financial ruin.

David Kesler a Harvard graduate working for Prospecta Oil in all innocence made four people invest in Prospecta Oil Shares. David was told that the company had made a fantastic strike in the North Sea and when they announce it the shares of the company would be at an all time peak.

Stephen Bradley, a visiting American professor at Oxford, chooses to get even rather than get mad and brings together the other three investors comprising of Harley Street's Dr. Robin Oakley, gallery owner Jean-Pierre Lamanns and Lord James Brigsley. They decide to turn the tables on Harvey. Combining their individual abilities and expertise, they each come up a scheme to relieve Harvey of the exact amount he robbed them of. "

All the four came up with their individual plans using their skills and area of expertise. James who initially did not come up so easily with the plan, ultimately surprised the other three with his plan. The four with their neatly laid plans went ahead in pursuit of their goal of defeating Metcalfe and getting their money back.

Navtej Kohli | Career Center Navtej Kohli | Dr. Navtej Kohli | Rediffblog on Navtej Kohli