Book Review

Articles

• Review: Steiner on Anctil’s ’Luminous Creatures: The History and Science of Light Production in Living Organisms’
  7 January 2023

  Reviewed by Katharina Steiner (University of Geneva)
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  Luminous Creatures: The History and Science of Light Production in Living Organisms by Michel Anctil
  Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
  2018. 488 pp. ISBN 978-0-7735-5312-5
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  With his book on the history and science of light production in living animals, Michel Anctil offers a rich history of a phenomenon that has triggered not only superstition, optical illusions, and imaginative worlds but also the (…)

• A Man Extraordinary Who Coined ’Jai Hind’ | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  28 May 2023, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Abid Hasan Safrani: Netaji’s Comrade-in-Arms
  Compiled by: Ismat Mehdi and Shehbaz Safrani
  Orient BlackSwan
  Pages: xxv + 148; Price: Rs 895. __0__
  He was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s sole Indian companion on his perilous 90-day submarine voyage from Europe to Asia in 1943. He was also the inventor of the INA’s – and subsequently free India’s – patriotic slogan: Jai Hind! If the Japanese had found a third seat for Netaji on what turned out to be his final air (…)

• Israel is reaping what it has sowed | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  1 March 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir] __0__
  The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine by Michael Scott-Baumann
  Picador India; Pages: 279; Price: Not given
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  After the killing of an Israeli woman and her two children in a Palestinian grenade attack, Israeli forces entered the West Bank village of Qibya in October 1953 and killed 69 of its inhabitants, most of them women and children. This was part of a policy Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion put in place to force (…)

• Uncovering the Ecologist in Marx: Kohei Saito
  10 April, by K. Sahadevan

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Marx in the Anthropocene
  Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
  by Kohei Saito, University of Tokyo
  Cambridge University Press
  15 January 2023 | ISBN: 9781108933544
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  Uncovering the Ecologist in Marx: Kohei Saito

• Covid-19 Pandemic Drove the Indian Economy on the Brink | Dipak Prakash
  27 February 2021

  Book Review by Dipak Prakash *
  Indian economy’s greatest crisis: Impact of the Coronavirus and the road ahead by Arun Kumar Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 264 pages - Dec 31, 2020
  The author Prof. Arun Kumar (well known for his magnum opus Black Economy in India) has attempted to explain how the widow’s cruse is likely to go empty. He succinctly explained why the insane and ill-conceived policy of the government be held responsible, and more so the Modinomics. Voodoo (…)

• Tanya Goyal. Review of Ohman, Carl, The Afterlife of Data
  6 December 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care
  by Carl Ohman
  University of Chicago Press
  2024. 200 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-82822-0
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  Reviewed by Tanya Goyal (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
  The internet never dies

• Book Review: Rowe-McCulloch on Enstad, ’Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II’
  5 December 2020

  Johannes D. Enstad. Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 272 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-42126-3; $32.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-108-43166-8.
  Reviewed by Maris Rowe-McCulloch (University of Regina) Published on H-Russia (July, 2020) Commissioned by Oleksa Drachewych (Western University)
  Johannes Enstad’s Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II is a history of the (…)

• Lala Lajpat Rai: A Hindu leader who was secular at heart | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  14 June 2024, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
  __0__ Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood
  by Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav
  Penguin/Viking
  ISBN: 9780670094073 Pages: xliii + 748; Price: Rs 1,299
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  Who was the real Lala Lajpat Rai? A veteran Congress leader and a leading star of the Indian freedom movement? Fiercely anti-British and who died due to grievous injuries he sustained in a street protest? A Hindu Mahasabha leader who advocated (…)

• Review of Nandita Haksar’s Shooting the Sun | Md Umar Faruque
  5 April 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Shooting the Sun: Why Manipur Was Engulfed by Violence and the Government Remained Silent
  by Nandita Haksar
  Speaking Tiger
  ISBN: 978-93-5447-701-0
  Year:2023
  Price: Rs 399/-
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  Manipur has been engulfed in violence since May 3, 2023. So far, hundreds have lost their lives, countless homes have been destroyed, and thousands remain displaced in relief camps. The economy has collapsed, and the education system lies in ruins. (…)

• Review of Kaplan and Illouz’s ’What is Sexual Capital?’’
  12 April 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  What is Sexual Capital?
  by Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz
  Polity Press, Cambridge 2022. 140 pp., pb ISBN 9781509552320
  Reviewed by Emily Laurent-Monaghan
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  Beginning with a note of irony, What is Sexual Capital? poses a seemingly straightforward question: ’what is sexual capital?’ The authors Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz begin by taking stock of recent sociological efforts to pursue the task of doing sociology more joyfully, to (…)