Book Review

Articles

• Review: Rani and Raza on Heewon Kim’s The Struggle for Equality
  27 May 2022

  Reviewed by: Chanda Rani and Aamir Raza
  __0__ The Struggle for Equality: India’s Muslims and Rethinking the UPA Experience by Heewon Kim
  Cambridge University Press 2019 Pages‘s: 247 Online ISBN: 9781108235839
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  The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government (2004-14) led by the congress came to power with strong policy initiative for the religious minorities of India more specifically aiming at Muslims. A series of measure were identified for the implementation to create (…)

• Marais’s Review of An Introduction to the History of Chronobiology by Jole Shackelford
  25 May 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  An Introduction to the History of Chronobiology, Volume 1: Biological Rhythms Emerge as a Subject of Scientific Research
  by Jole Shackelford
  University of Pittsburgh Press 2022. 332 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8229-4732-5
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  Reviewed by Johanné Marais
  If you are not yet thinking of the cyclical nature in everything, you may want to pick up Jole Shackelford’s An Introduction to the History of Chronobiology, Volume 1: Biological (…)

• Review of Jane Mumby’s Dismantling the League of Nations | Madeleine Dungy
  18 January 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Dismantling the League of Nations: The Quiet Death of an International Organization, 1945-8
  by Jane Mumby
  Bloomsbury Academic
  2024. ix + 252 pp.
  (e-book (pdf)), ISBN 978-1-350-37690-8;
  (e-book), ISBN 978-1-350-37692-2
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  Reviewed by Madeleine Dungy
  Today, as multilateral organizations are coming under strain, it has become clear that we lack insight into the processes through which they might be streamlined, (…)

• Paula Larsson. Review of Charles, Nicole, Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados
  15 April 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados by Nicole Charles
  Duke University Press 2021. xi + 196 pp. $25.95 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4780-1763-9.
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  Reviewed by Paula Larsson (University of Oxford)
  Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados is a short but gripping ethnographic study exploring the manifestation of suspicion as it relates to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine (…)

• Review: Brian Elliott on Stethoscope by Anna Harris, Tom Rice
  29 April 2023

  Reviewed by Brian Elliott (Wright Patterson Medical Center and Wright State University) __0__
  Stethoscope:
  The Making of a Medical Icon.
  by Anna Harris, Tom Rice
  Reaktion Books 2022. 191 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78914-633-2
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  The stethoscope is perhaps the most recognizable icon in medicine. Its early nineteenth-century invention by René Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec is well described by historians and articulated in Laënnec’s De l’auscultation médiate ou traité du diagnostic (…)

• Reading The Housekeeper and the Professor in a Distracted Century | Disha
  27 September 2025, by Disha

  In my quest to find some calm in this fast-paced world, and in my dwindling habit of reading, I picked up another short book, one I managed to finish in just two hours. It was Yoko Ogawa

• Amazing Truths about Our India | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  16 September 2022, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
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  The Temple of Treasures: And other Incredible Tales of Indian Monuments by Storytrails
  Hachette India Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9391028179 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9391028176
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  Captain John Smith of the East India Company had already shot 99 tigers and was hunting for his 100th kill near Aurangabad in Maharashtra when he spotted a series of caves hidden behind a waterfall. He had to light a makeshift torch to beat the pitch darkness. The caves smelled. (…)

• Periyar’s Revolutionary Critique of Religion | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  13 August 2022, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW __0__
  Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism by Karthick Ram Manoharan
  Orient BlackSwan March 2022 Pages: 133; Price: Rs 225 ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9354421679 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9354421679
  Believe it or not, it was Periyar’s pilgrimage to one of the holiest places of Hinduism that converted him into the religion’s inveterate enemy. Another irony is that though Periyar is revered in Tamil Nadu, the appeal of gods and religion remains firmly entrenched in the state.
  E.V. Ramasamy (…)

• Review of Budjeryn’s ’Inheriting the Bomb’ | Wesley Fite
  26 July 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine
  by Mariana Budjeryn
  Johns Hopkins University Press
  2022. 328 pp.
  (paper), ISBN 978-1-4214-4586-1.
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  Reviewed by Wesley Fite
  With the hindsight of the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine, some armchair strategists have questioned Ukraine

• McVeigh Review of Pesic’s ’Sounding Bodies’
  17 February 2023

  Reviewed by Bronwen McVeigh (University of Rochester)
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  Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science by Peter Pesic
  MIT Press
  2022. 408 pp.
  (paper), ISBN 978-0-262-04635-0
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  Pythagoras’s acousmatic veil feels like an appropriate place to begin a review regarding the intimate connections between the seemingly disparate fields of biomedical and music history. According to the tale, frustrated Pythagoras opted to teach behind a sheath, believing that the (…)