Devdutt Patnaik has moved on from coaching management students and finding the links between management and mythology to mythology full time. This pair of books talks about the philosophies of the two most powerful gods in the Hindu pantheon, Vishnu and Shiva and the reasons why they are as they are in Hindu philosophy. Vishnu is referred to as the Preserver while Shiva is known as the Destroyer. Alternatively Vishnu is the householder, worshipped with sprigs of tulsi, a household plant, while Shiva is the hermit, worshipped with leaves of bilva, grown outside the house. Occasionally, however, they appear to change their roles – Vishnu in his Kalki avatar takes on the form of the destroyer, while Shiva, the most detached of gods is the only one with a wife and children.

Devdutt Patanaik

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I’ve worked in the food industry for nearly 15 years. I think I’m quite a thoughtful and philosophical soul. So the idea of a book on Food and Philosophy appealed to me. However, perhaps I’d been expecting something a bit ‘lighter’; a bit more ‘Food for Dummies’ perhaps. I’d not really prepared myself for a highly academic treatment on the subject of food. I tried to read it in bed, I tried to read it in the bath but I never really found the time and place to get the most of this book.

In the introduction to the book the editors – Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe – suggest that the reader can treat the book as a menu from which choose the courses that interest them.

Dave Monroe, Fritz Allhoff

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Serial Killers: Being and Killing is part of a series published by Wiley-Blackwell that concentrates on providing a general view of philosophy for those (including this author) who are not experts in the area. Other books in the series concentrate on everyday life issues, including beer, cannabis, porn, cycling and Christmas, amongst others. Serial Killers is probably the most serious subject out of all of them, but it is nevertheless not as hard a read as some people may expect – it really will be quite comprehensible to most people, with only a few complicated terms, such as phenomenology, thrown in every now and again. The book as a whole deals with the reasons behind serial killing: why serial killers behave in the way that they do and how they are viewed by the public. The question of whether serial killers can ever be moral is raised, as is the question of whether we can learn anything from a serial killer’s behaviour.

S. Waller

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When I had Learning to Live in my hands, although I was supposed to offer it to our loyal book reviewers, I couldn’t resist the temptation to read it myself. I had to peek into this book despite the aversion I feel for all kind ‘for dummies’ books, self improvement or fashionable books. Dumbing-down tendencies that surround us make me cringe but I risked by starting reading this ‘manual’.

To be fair to Luc Ferry he is not advertising his book as self improvement manual which will by the end of the last page give you a clear answer to all difficult questions about our existence.

Luc Ferry

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