Book Review

Articles

• The lessons from Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday misery | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  26 July 2024, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir] __0__
  Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community
  by Rohan Gunaratna
  Penguin Books Pages: lxxvi + 238 Price: Singapore$ 28.90 __0__
  It was sheer incompetence at the highest level of governance that helped the Islamic State to devastate Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in 2019, slaughtering 275 people and injuring almost 600. The suicide bombings were the worst terrorist onslaught by the IS outside the Iraqi and (…)

• Subramanian’s Review of Kathmandu Chronicle by Rajan and Thakur
  5 October 2024, by K S Subramanian

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Kathmandu Chronicle
  Reclaiming India

• Review of Bonnell, Andrew G., Robert Michels, Socialism, and Modernity | Jens-Uwe Guettel
  25 October 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Socialism, and Modernity
  by Andrew G. Bonnell. Robert Michels
  Oxford University Press
  2022
  viii + 282 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-287184-8
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  Sociology and Socialism
  Andrew G. Bonnell

• Khushwant Singh was far-sighted saw fascism rising / Dipankar Gupta’s book of Lockdown | Humra Quraishi
  7 July 2023, by Humra Quraishi

  6 July 2023
  Khushwant Singh was far-sighted. Over 10 years back, before he passed away in 2014, he was worried about — RISE OF FASCISM in the country.
  Khushwant Singh’s worries were several in terms of the political scenario in the country. He would talk and write of the communal poisoning spreading around, and the rise of the fascist forces, spreading fear.
  Khushwant Singh brought to the fore this vital fact: ‘Don’t overlook the fact that before Jinnah had come up with the two-nation (…)

• Review of Takahashi’s Fukushima Futures | James W. Seabrooke III
  5 July 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape by Satsuki Takahashi
  University of Washington Press 2023. 194 pp ISBN 978-0-295-75134-4
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  Reviewed by James W. Seabrooke III
  Environmental Futurism and an Ethnography of Fishermen in the Joban Seascape
  Views of a sustainable future can become quickly obfuscated and disjointed for coastal communities when they are affected by life- and society-disrupting (…)

• A Revolutionary Revolt Pre-1857 | M R Narayan Swamy
  27 November 2021, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
  Foreshadowing the Great Rebellion: The Vellore Revolt, 1806 by K.A. Manikumar
  Orient BlackSwan
  ISBN 9789354421181
  Pages 288
  Price: Rs 695
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  About half a century before the 1857 Rebellion or the First War of Independence, hundreds of Indian soldiers of the East India Company revolted against the British in 1806 in Vellore in present day Tamil Nadu. It was brutally crushed and hundreds of soldiers were mercilessly slaughtered by the British. In many ways, the (…)

• Review of The Rafale Deal: Flying Lies? by Ravi Nair and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta | Shubham Sharma
  13 May 2023

  Book Review:
  by Shubham Sharma
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  The Rafale Deal: Flying Lies? The Role of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India’s Biggest Defence Scandal
  by Ravi Nair and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
  2022. pp 532 HB: Rs 795
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  Until recently, India, like other Western-capitalist countries, lacked a robust domestic ‘military-industrial complex’ (MIC). It could be defined as the presence of a defence procurement mechanism which involves a transactional nexus between private group(s) that (…)

• Saha on Guha’s The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics
  19 November 2022

  Book Review by Soumya Saha __0__
  The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics: Chronicling Continuity and Change by Ayan Guha
  Leiden/Boston: Brill 2022 Price: €145.00 309 pages Hardback-ISBN: 978-90-04-51181-1 E-Book -ISBN: 978-90-04-51456-0
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  Since the demise of the Left Front government in West Bengal, scholarly interest in the changing political dynamics in the state, particularly in the political role of caste has significantly increased (Chandra et. al, 2016; (…)

• When Thugs and Dacoits Defied the British | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  19 November 2022, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Tales of Crimes Past: A Casebook of Crime in Colonial India
  by Sunil Nair
  Hachette India
  Pages: 226; Price: Rs 599
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  They were thugs, they held the authorities in contempt, they strangled innocent travellers at will, and they never showed remorse for the innumerable cold-blooded murders they committed. But they were a bizarre lot. Before they set out to kill, they studied good and bad omens. Welcome to the world of thuggery in British India.
  According to (…)

• Review of Brunstedt, Jonathan, The Soviet Myth of World War II
  29 March 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR
  by Jonathan Brunstedt
  Cambridge University Press
  Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Series
  2021, 320 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-49875-3
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  Reviewed by Christopher Bishop (University of Southern Mississippi)
  In May 1945, Joseph Stalin raised a toast to the