Book Review

Articles

• Sweeping Western Sanctions Fail to Cripple Putin | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  2 November 2024, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Punishing Putin: Inside the Global Economic War to Bring down Russia
  by Stephanie Baker
  Mudlark
  Pages: xiv + 351; Price: Rs 699
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  When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it heralded the largest land war in Europe since World War II. But there was no way the West was going to go for a direct military confrontation with a country with more nuclear warheads than any other. That would have been (…)

• Buxton’s Review of Chen, Thomas, Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film
  9 December 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Review by David Buxton
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  Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film
  by Thomas Chen
  Columbia University Press 2022. 248 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-20400-2; (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-20401-9
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  Tiananmen and Censorship in China
  Any book about China at present runs the risk of being commandeered by the latent, impending Cold War between China and the United States; an analysis of the former’s political system that highlights its (…)

• How Western Generosity Helped Stalin Crush Hitler | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  24 August 2024, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War by Giles Milton
  John Murray (Hachette India) May 2024 Pages: ix + 372; Price: Rs 999 ISBN: 978-1529398519
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  There can be no doubt that steely and raw courage proved the tripping point in the beleaguered Soviet Union’s near impossible military triumph over Germany in World War II. At a time when it was widely feared that Hitler would overrun Moscow after having (…)

• Sarah Foss. Review of Nolan, Rachel, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala
  24 August 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Rachel Nolan. Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024. 309 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-27035-0.
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  Reviewed by Sarah Foss (Oklahoma State University)
  Every so often, we hear a statistic that seems improbable at best, unfathomable, even, given the reality we think we know. Such a moment occurs in the opening pages of Rachel Nolan’s book, Until I Find (…)

• Review of O’Keeffe’s, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia
  4 November 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Reviewed by Jasmine Calver
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  Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia by Brigid O’Keeffe
  London: Bloomsbury Academic 2021. 266 pp. $35.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-350-16067-5; $35.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-350-16066-8.
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  Esperanto and Internationalism
  Historians of internationalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries will have at least some knowledge of Esperanto, although for most the international language project remains (…)

• Review of Harris’s Critical Theory and the Critique of Alternative Societies: Co-operatives, Mutual Aid and Universal Basic Income | Domonkos Sik
  1 June

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Critical Theory and the Critique of Alternative Societies: Co-operatives, Mutual Aid and Universal Basic Income
  by Neal Harris
  Manchester University Press
  2026. 184 pp.,
  ISBN 9781526172228
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  Reviewed by Domonkos Sik
  Neal Harris is taking on a daunting quest: critiquing those emancipatory movements that, by their own definition and according to the mainstream view of Marxist and critical sociology, are supposed to widen the

• A Star of Cochin Port Sounds Wake Up Call for Kerala | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  13 September 2025, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Notes from Willingdon Island: The Past, The Present, and The Future of Cochin Port and its Hinterland
  by N. Ramachandran
  Konark
  Pages: xxvi + 334; Price: Rs 900
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  This is a beautiful and straight-from-the-heart account of the Cochin Port

• 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 (…)

• 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 (…)

• Review of Bakhurst’s The Heart of the Matter | Corinna Lotz
  1 February 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  The Heart of the Matter: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought
  by David Bakhurst
  Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2024. 402 pp., pb
  ISBN 9798888902165
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  Reviewed by Corinna Lotz
  Bakhurst plays a kind of devil