Book Review

Articles

• Excellent Commentary on Assam-Centre Relationship in a Crucial Period
  18 August 2013

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Yogesh Puri
  Gopinath Bardoloi, “The Assam Problem” and Nehru’s Centre by Nirode K. Barooah; Bhabani Print and Publications, Guwahati; 2010; pp. 675.
  “...The subject I have touched in this book and the material used for the purpose are still largely untouched and unknown….No one else has cared to study Bardoloi in such depth as the present author.” (p. ix) Indeed, this is not a tall or boastful claim by the author. The claim is convincingly vindicated by his (…)

• All-encompassing Economic History of Indian Peasantry
  26 December 2009, by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

  BOOK REVIEW
  Peasant History of Late Pre-Colonial and Colonial India by Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri; Pearson Education, New Delhi; 2008; pp. xxv+939.
  It is always difficult to review a book by a teacher. Such a review always tends to become a tribute rather than a critical analysis of the content and arguments of the book. And I will not even try to pretend that I have been able to avoid that pitfall here, for I learnt my first lessons in the economic history of India from Professor Binay (…)

• Book Review: Understanding the Nuances of Development
  19 May 2007, by G Narasimha Raghavan

  Development Discourse: Issues and Concerns by T.K. Oommen; Regency Publications, New Delhi; 2004 .
  Back in 1965, Dudley Seers wondered aloud:
  What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all three of these have become less severe, then beyond doubt this has been a period of development for the country concerned. If one or two of these central problems have been growing worse, especially if all three have, it would (…)

• Cutting-Jones Review of Katz-Rosene, Ryan M.; Martin, Sarah J., eds., Green Meat
  29 October 2021

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Hannah Cutting-Jones
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  Green Meat? Sustaining Eaters, Animals, and the Planet
  by Ryan M. Katz-Rosene, Sarah J. Martin, eds.
  April 2020
  272 pp.
  ISBN 9780228001331
  Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. __0__
  Green Meat? takes on a critically important and complex issue: whether meat can or should be part of a sustainable food system in a future clouded by climate change. Central to the debates laid out in this collection of essays are competing (…)

• Review of Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys | John Lloyd
  23 March 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]
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  ZINKY BOYS: The Record of a Lost Soviet Generation
  by Svetlana Alexievich
  translated by Julia Whitby and Robin Whitby.
  Chatto, 192 pp., January 1992 0 7011 3838 6
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  Among the many thoughts which this sad, sometimes unreadably sad book suggests is this: did the Afghan war mark the beginning of the most dramatic military event of our time, the dissolution of the Soviet Armed Forces? Did the crumbling of belief and will (…)

• Book Review: The Scars of Democracy - Theodor Adorno and the crises of liberalism | Peter E. Gordon
  27 January 2024

  BOOK REVIEW
  Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
  By Theodor W. Adorno; Wieland Hoban, trans.
  On April 6, 1967, Theodor W. Adorno accepted an invitation from the Association of Socialist Students at the University of Vienna to deliver a lecture on “aspects of the new right-wing extremism.” The topic held a special urgency: The National Democratic Party, a recently founded neofascist group in West Germany, was surging in popularity and would soon surpass the official 5 percent (…)

• Review of Gareth Leng, Rhodri Ivor Leng, The Matter of Facts | Jessica R. Avery
  19 August 2022

  BOOK REVIEW
  __0__ The Matter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evidence in Science
  by Gareth Leng, Rhodri Ivor Leng
  Cambridge: MIT Press 2020. Illustrations. 376 pp (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-04388-5; (e-book), ISBN 978-0-262-35828-6.
  __0__
  Reviewed by Jessica R. Avery (DePaul University)
  As the title suggests, Gareth Leng and Rhodri Ivor Leng’s collaborative book, The Matter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evidence in Science, presents an insightful, critical, and (…)

• Reading Arundhati Roy Against My Will | Disha
  22 May, by Disha

  For most of my life I have read political writing with a sense of duty rather than desire. I read to stay informed, not to feel changed. The books I encountered often seemed to assume a reader who could absorb weight without needing warmth, and I finished them more knowledgeable, but no more connected to the world they described.
  When I picked up the memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me, I expected the same. I did not expect the book to reach the private interior of my reluctance or alter the (…)

• Book Review: What Can India do in Afghanistan? | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  1 July 2022

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Afghanistan: The New Great Game
  Edited by Alok Bansal
  Pentagon Press LLP; Pages: 201; Price: Rs 895 ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9390095492
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  Now that America has blundered and Pakistan has scored a strategic victory with the return of the Taliban, what are India’s options vis-à-vis Afghanistan?
  Can there be a meeting point between a country like India and a radical Islamist outfit like Taliban?
  One of the best known experts on the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, (…)

• Reclaiming a Revolutionary: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani; Interrogating Historiography | Deepti Priya Mehrotra
  22 May 2021, by Deepti Priya Mehrotra

  BOOK REVIEW
  Geraldine Forbes—Lost Letters and Feminist History—The Political Friendship of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2020.
  review by Deepti Mehrotra *
  Early in 1920, 47-year-old Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and 50-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi pledged to write each other at least one letter per day. The intensity of their correspondence, and friendship, lasted barely one year. During this time a few hundred letters passed between them, for (…)