On The Shelf

Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone
By Jon Agar

One needs to jump off the daily treadmill to really appreciate how the mobile phone has changed our lives — how we communicate, how we organise our lives and how we multitask. Indeed, how we measure distance. Agar’s book appears to be as much of a technological overview as of a crash course in pop sociology. He harks back to the nineties when the mobile was still seen as an elitist, yuppie accessory, when it was yet another way of establishing inverse snobbery. Today, when the mobile phone has cut across all social and many economic barriers, that seems like a lifetime ago.

Khrushchev, The Man and the Era
By William Taubman

Strobe Talbott, Khrushchev’s translator during his student days at Oxford and a reputed Russia hand, has already labelled this the most comprehensive biography of Soviet liberaliser. Today, as Stalin’s dark legacy and the Cuban missile crisis continue to be debated, an appraisal of the man who influenced that other Soviet reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, is timely.