Book Review

Articles

• A poignant docu-memoir on the Sikhs of Kashmir | Joydip Ghosal
  2 November 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Those Who Stayed, The Sikhs of Kashmir by Bupinder Singh Bali
  Manjul Publishing House Pvt Ltd 2024, 308 pages ISBN-10 ? : ? 9355436297 ISBN-13 ? : ? 978-9355436290
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  Those Who Stayed, The Sikhs of Kashmir by Bupinder Singh Bali is a poignant narrative on the Sikhs of Kashmir. In this deeply personal saga, he interweaved their past, present and future which stared at deep abyss of uncertainty. In mainstream media and (…)

• 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 (…)

• Memoirs of an Exalite | Sreejith K
  19 October 2024

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Oranweshanathinte katha
  by K. Venu
  DC Books 2023, 752 pages ISBN: 9789354829383
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  Reviewed by Sreejith K
  In an iconic scene from Sandesham, which has over the years acquired a cult status amongst the Malayalis for its trenchant political satire, a communist party worker, Sreenivasan, during a pennukaanal (would-be bride seeing), after some perfunctory questions on Marxism to the bewilderment of the girl, asks her whether she would be willing to spend the (…)

• A Gripping Autopsy of Japan | M R Narayan Swamy
  3 September 2021, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
  __0__ ’Orienting: An Indian in Japan’ by Pallavi Aiyar
  HarperCollins India https://harpercollins.co.in/product/orienting/ 2021 Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages ₹ 499.00 ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9354227643 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9354227646
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  Life in Japan can be stranger than fiction.
  Indian journalist and author Pallavi Aiyar realized this during a four-year stay in Japan as she probed the inscrutable Japanese and their way of life, discovering in the process why people in the (…)

• Ghachar Ghochar Waited for Me to Grow Up
  17 August 2025, by Disha

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Ghachar Ghochar
  by Vivek Shanbhag
  HarperCollins Publishers India
  2015
  124 pages
  ISBN-10: ? 9789351776178
  ISBN-13: ? 978-9351776178
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  Sometimes a story does not unfold for the sake of entertainment or instruction but simply sits in a room, quietly existing, until you are ready to meet it on its own terms. Ghachar Ghochar is not a loud novel, nor is it in a rush to deliver a climax or resolution. It simply waits, almost (…)

• Review of Kirkwood’s, Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900
  7 October 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Reviewed by Jeff S. Nagy (University of Michigan)
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  Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 by Jeffrey West Kirkwood University of Minnesota Press 2022. vii + 235 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5179-1253-6 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5179-1254-3
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  This isn’t your parents’ history of computing. It would have to be at least your great-grandparents’. Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 finds a prehistory for digital (…)

• Kritskiy’s Review of Glaser, Lee, (eds.) Comintern Aesthetics
  17 December 2021

  Reviewed by Vsevolod Kritskiy (University of Amsterdam) __0__ Comintern Aesthetics
  Amelia M. Glaser, Steven S. Lee, eds.
  Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2020 Illustrations. xxi + 563 pp. $95.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-0465-6 __0__
  In Comintern Aesthetics, editors Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee include sixteen diverse chapters that seek to “remap world literature and culture from the perspective of world communism” (p. 3). In a timely and welcome collection, the contributing (…)

• Indian Left in a Pit: The Way Out? Prof. Achin Vanaik Examines | Sukla Sen
  5 March 2021, by Sukla Sen

  by Sukla Sen
  Professor Achin Vanaik, to the discerning Indian public in particular, is quite a familiar name—both as a radical intellectual and an activist as well, especially in the field of anti-nuclear peace movement; is a co-recipient, with (late) Praful Bidwai, of the International Peace Bureau’s Sean McBride International Peace Prize for 2000.
  Prof. Vanaik, who had started his professional career as a journalist with the Times of India, back in the ’70s, is intellectually, and even (…)

• Iran Stands at a Dangerous Crossroad | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  1 March 2025, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]
  fond noir]
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  Iran

• Emergency Transforms a Revolutionary | M R Narayan Swamy
  3 December 2021, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
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  The Struggle Within: A Memoir of the Emergency
  by Ashok Chakravarti
  HarperCollins India
  July 2021
  221 Pages; Price: Rs 399
  ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9354227473 __0__
  A young man jettisons his dream to do PhD in Oxford and returns to India in the summer of 1973 filled with Marxist enthusiasm to bring a revolution in the country. Although Indira Gandhi was hailed as a Durga only two years earlier after breaking up Pakistan, a failing economy had sparked unrest all (…)