by Hernando de Soto (Bantam Press – 243 pages) Reviewer – Luke Brown The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. So begins the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s intriguing work on his view why Capitalism has triumphed in the West, but seemingly failed so many in the developing and former communist…

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(2000) (Penguin – 512 pages) Reviewer – Rob Wood Crimes Against Humanity, by Geoffrey Robertson, is far from a light bed-time read. The famous human rights lawyer attempts a discourse on the history, legality, politics, and implications of human rights since the time of Hammurabi, but focusing mainly on post WW2. In doing so he…

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(1924) (Hutchinson & Co. – 317 pages) Reviewer – Rob Wood “With Lawrence in Arabia” by Lowell Thomas is one of the classic adventure biographies of all time. It covers the turbulent life of Lawrence of Arabia, with special consideration for his antics in the Middle Eastern campaigns of World War One. Thomas was commissioned…

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(HarperCollins – 576 pages) Reviewer – Luke Brown India: a history, by John Keay, attempts to chart the course of the history of India from around 3000 BC to the end of the century just passed, in one volume. It was always going to be a tough task. 5,000 years contains an immense amount of…

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(Hurst & Company, London – 432 pages) Reviewer – Luke Brown Admittedly its birth as a nation state is more recent than most, but it is still surprising that there are not more books devoted to Pakistan’s turbulent history. Although its fierce rivalry with India (as notably played out with the Kashmir conflict and mutually…

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(Review – 240 pages) Reviewer – Luke Brown “Mountain Men and Holy Wars” Ominously, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, in his book The Grand Chessboard, stated that, geopolitically, there is no more important area in the world than the Caucasus. His reasons, as cited in Nicholas Griffin’s fascinating “Caucasus,”…

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