Book Review

Articles

• Political Autobiography of a Midnight’s Child | John Dayal
  17 February 2024, by John Dayal

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  Keeping Up The Good Fight
  From The Emergency To The Present Day
  by Prabir Purkayastha
  LeftWord Books, New Delhi 2023, 230 pages
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  For any of his contemporaries born in a freshly minted independent India, Prabir Purkayastha’s book, “Keeping Up The Good Fight”, is a total recall, in lightning-fast picture flash cards, of the last sixty-years of our own life after leaving school. With the difference that Prabir bookends the (…)

• Review of Hoxha, Artan R.. Sugarland: The Transformation of the Countryside in Communist Albania | Andrew Pfannkuche
  22 March 2025

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  Sugarland: The Transformation of the Countryside in Communist Albania
  by Artan R. Hoxha
  Central European University Press
  2023. xi + 293 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 9789633866160.
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  Reviewed by Andrew Pfannkuche (Universit

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

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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 (…)

• The Birth, Growth and Demise of Public Sector | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  22 March 2025, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Public Sector and Privatization in India
  by Sheela Dubey
  Speaking Tiger
  Pages: 271; Price: Rs 699
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  Jawaharlal Nehru was no doubt a great votary of the public sector but the ills plaguing what was seen as

• 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 (…)

• Review of Mansoor Khan’s ’ONE: The Story of the Ultimate Myth’ | T Vijayendra
  21 October 2023, by T. Vijayendra

  BOOK REVIEW
  by T. Vijayendra
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  ONE: The Story of the Ultimate Myth
  by Mansoor Khan
  Harper Collins India 2023, Pp. 145
  Available at Amazon Rs. 449/-
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  It is a gem of a book! It is a small book, 145 pages. It is a fiction, a novella. Very satisfactory reading! Reminds me of the feeling I got after reading some of the great novellas - Lu Hsun’s ‘The True Story of Ah Q’ or Rajinder Singh Bedi’s ‘Ek Chadar Maili Si’. It has the touch of a film editor – not a single wasted (…)

• Review of Ellermann, Greg, Thought’s Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature | Paige Figanbaum
  9 June 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Paige Figanbaum (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
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  Thought’s Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature by Greg Ellermann
  Stanford University Press 2022. xiii + 180 pp (cloth) ISBN 978-1-5036-2848-9
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  Greg Ellermann’s book Thought’s Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature, provides a thorough examination of the significance of nature as a concept. The author argues that without the romanticism movement, society would view and (…)

• Review of Jayaramu’s Decoding Indian Politics | Girija K S
  22 May

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  Decoding Indian Politics by P S Jayaramu
  Writers Choice Publications Pvt Ltd., New Delhi.
  ISBN NO 978-93-49389-02-1
  No of pages: 260
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  This book is a compilation of articles written by Prof. P S Jayaramu, formerly Professor of Political science in Bangalore University. An ardent writer and a scholar of Political science and International relations, Professor Jayaramu has produced many students and has guided scholars, has been (…)

• 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 (…)

• Beyond the Fences: A Rationale for Cohesive Development | Sanjoy De, Atanu Sengupta
  20 April 2025

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  Birth of an Alternative Development Paradigm: Unfolding of Transformative Mode of Production
  by Sunil Ray
  Germinal Publications Pvt. Ltd. (Publisher of frontier weekly)
  2024. 250 INR.
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  Development is the buzzword of today. Everybody speaks of it as if it is the only religion and pursuit of the modern day. In his populist book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari (2015) argued that the ability of man to (…)