Book Review

Articles

• An honest police officer speaks but questions remain | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  9 February 2024, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Crime, Grime and Gumption: Case Files of an IPS Officer by O.P. Singh
  Penguin Random House 2024 235 pages; Price: Rs 499 ISBN: 9780143464167 235pages; Price: Rs 499 __0__
  It is indeed a remarkable personal triumph when a 14-year-old who goes to a police station in a rural part of Bihar and is told to return home to fetch writing paper if he wants to report a theft in his house eventually becomes the police chief of India’s most (…)

• Ram Puniyani on Bremen and Shah’s Gujarat, Cradle and Harbinger of Identity Politics: India’s Injurious Frame of Communalism
  22 April 2022

  Book Review by Ram Puniyani
  __0__ Gujarat, Cradle and Harbinger of Identity Politics: India’s Injurious Frame of Communalism
  by Jan Breman and Ghanshyam Shah
  Tulika Books, New Delhi 2022. 388 Pages Price: Rs. 1200 ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 819505594X ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8195055944 __0__
  India has witnessed communal violence from over a century. The Gujarat carnage stands out as a major blot in the series of acts of violent episodes for more reasons than one. This was a state where even before (…)

• Review: Ramesh on Dewan’s Misreading the Bengal Delta
  12 November 2022

  Book reveiw by Aditya Ramesh*
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  Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh
  by Camelia Dewan
  University of Washington Press 2021. Illustrations, maps, tables. 254 pp. (cloth) ISBN 978-0-295-74960-0; $30.00 (paper) ISBN 978-0-295-74961-7.
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  Frequent headlines emanating from South Asia on extreme weather events are now unmissable, for example, Pakistan’s devastating floods, with some sources estimating a third of the (…)

• Review of Abbas’s Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb |
  13 April 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb: A Story of Defiance, Deterrence and Deviance
  by Hassan Abbas
  Oxford University Press
  2018. 356 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-090157-8
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  Reviewed by Raymond Whisenhunt (Air University, Air War College)
  Pakistan

• Review of Scheinbaum’s The Darker Side of Social Media | Arun Kumar & Jyoti Yadav
  1 March 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Darker Side of Social Media: Consumer Psychology and

• Will Yogi Adityanath get to rule India? | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  21 January 2022, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
  Yogi Adityanath: Religion, Politics and Power - The Untold Story
  by Sharat Pradhan and Atul Chandra
  Penguin Random House
  288 Pages
  Nov/2021
  ISBN: 9780143442431
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  Will Yogi Adityanath be the Prime Minister of India one day? Does the monk-turned-Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, qualify for the coveted job? If journalists Sharat Pradhan and Atul Chandra are to be believed, this could become a possibility; in any case, Adityanath, (…)

• Review of Stanley’s How Fascism Works | Waheed Ahmad Rather
  19 July 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
  by Jason Stanley
  Random House
  2018, xix, 218 pp, Price. Rs 582.00
  (Hardcover), ISBN 978-0-525-51183-0
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  Jason Stanley

• Thom Loyd. Review of Iandolo, Alessandro, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968
  31 August 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968
  by Alessandro Iandolo
  Cornell University Press 2022. xv + 287 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-6443-1.
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  Reviewed by Thom Loyd (Augusta University)
  In his 1955 novel, Flamingo Feather, the Afrikaner writer Laurens van der Post painted a sinister picture of Soviet influence in Africa, one in which the Soviet Union used whatever underhand means it (…)

• Review: Bangalore’s Street-Based Sex Workers - Experiences of Urban Transition | Deepti Priya Mehrotra
  4 November 2022, by Deepti Priya Mehrotra

  BOOK REVIEW
  Review by Deepti Priya Mehrotra
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  Urban Undesirables: City Transition and Street-Based Sex Work in Bangalore By Neethi P. and Anant Kamath
  Cambridge University Press, New Delhi 2022, Pages 211, Hard Bound, Price 895.00 ISBN: 9781009180214 __0__
  This book seeks to redraw the map of Bangalore, based on the experiences of street-based sex workers—so that we begin to see the city through their eyes. Their livelihoods rendered increasingly precarious due to neo-liberal (…)

• When Truth Defeated Murdoch | M R Narayan Swamy
  2 April 2021, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
  Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies Publishers: Vintage Books, London; Pages 444; Price: 14.99 pounds
  FOR too long he was considered invincible. The Australia-born American media mogul was all too powerful, who thought he could make and unmake governments — if nowhere else certainly in Britain. And his was a vast empire. Murdoch owned (and still does) hundreds of local, national and international publishing outlets including The Sun and (…)