Book Review

Articles

• Review: State Absence as Presence: Service Delivery in Postcolonial Nigeria | Ruth Carlitz
  10 February 2023

  Reviewed by Ruth Carlitz (University of Amsterdam)
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  Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith
  Princeton: Princeton University Press
  2022. 232 pp. (e-book), ISBN 978-0-691-22991-1 (paper), ISBN 978-0-691-22989-8
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  The Nigerian expression Daniel Jordan Smith employs as the main title of his insightful 2022 book, Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, (…)

• Book Review: Ram Jethmalani - A Perennial Rebel | M R Narayan Swamy
  6 February 2021, by M R Narayan Swamy

  Title: The Rebel: A Biography of Ram Jethmalani; Author: Susan Adelman; Publishers: Shobhaa De Books (An Imprint of Penguin Random House): Pages: 607; Price: Rs 550
  The legendary Ram Jethmalani, who passed away just before turning 96, was one of the most successful lawyers the Indian sub-continent produced. A legal craftsman, a part-time politician, a maverick of sorts, a quintessential Sindhi, an admirer of good looking women till the very end… Ram was all this and more. Just how did he (…)

• A British View of Colonial India | M R Narayan Swamy
  30 July 2021, by M R Narayan Swamy

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  Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India
  by Roderick Matthews
  HarperCollins India
  20 June 2021
  Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 440 pages
  ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9354227325 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9354227325
  Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India by Roderick Matthews https://www.amazon.in/dp/9354227325/
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  If freelance writer Roderick Matthews is to be believed, Indians complain too much about British (mis)rule of the sprawling (…)

• Review of Khan’s City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh | Sajad Ahmad Dar
  3 February 2024

  BOOK REVIEW
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  City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh by Zeyad Masroor Khan
  Harper Collins India 2023 Pages: 297 Price: INR 599/- (Hardcover) ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9356998248 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9356998247
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  The book under review is a memoir of a young Muslim. It explores the everyday Hindu-Muslim strifes in the U.K (Upar Kot, not to be confused with the United Kingdom), a part of the town of Aligarh (130 kms southeast of Delhi) in Uttar Pradesh, since the 1990s. The memoir can partly (…)

• Buxton’s Review of Chen, Thomas, Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film
  9 December 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Review by David Buxton
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  Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film
  by Thomas Chen
  Columbia University Press 2022. 248 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-20400-2; (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-20401-9
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  Tiananmen and Censorship in China
  Any book about China at present runs the risk of being commandeered by the latent, impending Cold War between China and the United States; an analysis of the former’s political system that highlights its (…)

• Review of Monica Liu’s Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides under China’s Global Rise
  23 September 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Reviewed by Hsunhui Tseng (National Cheng Kung University) __0__
  Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides under China’s Global Rise by Monica Liu
  Stanford University Press, 2022. xiii + 239 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5036-3247-9; $28.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5036-3373-5
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  The phenomenon of the mail-order bride has been studied for a long time, with these studies often linking this form of commercialized marriage to women trafficking and the global sex trade. However, (…)

• 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: Subramanian on ’Phantom Lovers: Two Novellas’ by Achala Moulik
  23 December 2023, by K S Subramanian

  Book Review


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  Phantom Lovers: Two Novellas by Achala Moulik
  Niyogi Books
  2023 | 384 Pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8196405332 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8196405335
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  The author, a civil servant-scholar, has the gift for writing about human love in the midst of violence and conflict. The volume contains two moving ‘novellas’; one on India titled ‘With Fate Conspire’ and the other on Afghanistan titled Wait!
  The author’s Note on the first novella draws from Rabindranath Tagore’s dance (…)

• 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

• Review of O’Keeffe’s, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia
  4 November 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Reviewed by Jasmine Calver
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  Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia by Brigid O’Keeffe
  London: Bloomsbury Academic 2021. 266 pp. $35.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-350-16067-5; $35.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-350-16066-8.
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  Esperanto and Internationalism
  Historians of internationalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries will have at least some knowledge of Esperanto, although for most the international language project remains (…)