Bibliofile

SPORTS writer G. Rajaraman’s Match-Fixing—The Enemy Within is a quickie butwithout the genre’s usual attractions. Written too fast for any insights into thebetting scandal that rocked the cricket world, but arriving too late to whet thereaders’ appetite for murky dealings. Rajaraman pieces together the story, detail bysordid detail. Missing, however, is solid investigation on how betting syndicatesfunction, especially the game’s biggest bookie, the mysterious MK. And guesswho’s the "man who helped start the cleaning up of Indian cricket"? Noneother than Manoj Prabhakar, according to Rajaraman.

NEARLY two years after he threatened to tell all, former Chief of Naval Staff Adml VishnuBhagwat does indeed spill it, and it’s mostly bile. In this imaginative version ofthe "conspiracy" against national defence, Bhagwat casts himself as the heroagainst villains who range from defence minister George Fernandes to former defencesecretary Ajit Kumar and his successor Adml Sushil Kumar, "the cat’s paw".Little-known Manas Publications dared to step in where others feared to tread, publishinghis ambitiously titled Betrayal of the Defence Forces—The Inside Truth. The"inside truth" is half the size of The Insider but bares more in the first fewpages than the former PM did in his excessively disguised memoirs.

WHAT Brajesh Mishra is to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, his father D.P. Mishra wasto Indira Gandhi during her early years as PM. But in his three volumes of politicalmemoirs—India’s March to Freedom, The Nehru Epoch and The Post NehruEra—being marketed for their "ruthless candour," neither Indira nor Nehrunor, of course, her son Sanjay Gandhi emerge unscathed.