Book Review

Articles

• Book Review: What Can India do in Afghanistan? | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  1 July 2022

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Afghanistan: The New Great Game
  Edited by Alok Bansal
  Pentagon Press LLP; Pages: 201; Price: Rs 895 ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9390095492
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  Now that America has blundered and Pakistan has scored a strategic victory with the return of the Taliban, what are India’s options vis-à-vis Afghanistan?
  Can there be a meeting point between a country like India and a radical Islamist outfit like Taliban?
  One of the best known experts on the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, (…)

• Review of Electrifying Mexico by Diana J. Montaño | Jaclyn A. Sumner
  12 August 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Reviewed by Jaclyn A. Sumner (Presbyterian College)
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  Electrifying Mexico:
  Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City
  by Diana J. Montaño
  University of Texas Press 2021. Illustrations. xiv + 373 pp. (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2345-8
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  In Electrifying Mexico, Diana J. Montaño examines how government officials, engineers, citizens, and others worked to illuminate and power up Mexico City, the nation’s capital and emblem of progress. Montaño’s book is (…)

• A Classic on Indian Magic | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  15 April 2023, by M R Narayan Swamy

  BOOK REVIEW
  Jadoowallahas, Jugglers, and Jinns:
  A Magical History of India
  by John Zubrzycki
  Pan Macmillan India — Picador India Pages: 508 ISBN 9789386215352 __0__
  Magic, in case you did not know, is as old as India. Indeed, the blurred boundaries between magic, mythology and religion continue to be the defining feature of Indian enchantment, the origins of which go back to the start of the Harappan civilization nearly 5,000 years ago. Australian diplomat-turned-writer John (…)

• Bhagat’s Review of Toxic Immanence by Livia Monnet
  15 July 2023

  Reviewed by Raina Bhagat (Northwestern University)
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  Toxic Immanence:
  Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures
  by Livia Monnet
  Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022. 472 pp. ISBN 978-0-228-01136-1
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  Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures is an edited collection with an ambitious scope, making impressive strides across both disciplines and genres to sketch out numerous paths toward the unequivocal need for the abolition of nuclear (…)

• Reclaiming a Revolutionary: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani; Interrogating Historiography | Deepti Priya Mehrotra
  22 May 2021, by Deepti Priya Mehrotra

  BOOK REVIEW
  Geraldine Forbes—Lost Letters and Feminist History—The Political Friendship of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2020.
  review by Deepti Mehrotra *
  Early in 1920, 47-year-old Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and 50-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi pledged to write each other at least one letter per day. The intensity of their correspondence, and friendship, lasted barely one year. During this time a few hundred letters passed between them, for (…)

• Book Review: The Scars of Democracy - Theodor Adorno and the crises of liberalism | Peter E. Gordon
  27 January 2024

  BOOK REVIEW
  Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
  By Theodor W. Adorno; Wieland Hoban, trans.
  On April 6, 1967, Theodor W. Adorno accepted an invitation from the Association of Socialist Students at the University of Vienna to deliver a lecture on “aspects of the new right-wing extremism.” The topic held a special urgency: The National Democratic Party, a recently founded neofascist group in West Germany, was surging in popularity and would soon surpass the official 5 percent (…)

• How A Secret Meet Between Badal and Rajiv Fizzled Out | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  18 March 2023, by M R Narayan Swamy

  Living a Life Hardcover by Ravi Sawhney Konark Publishers Pvt.Ltd | 10 February 2023 Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 264 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8195678637 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8195678631 __0__
  1980 brought the Congress to power in Punjab and turned the defeated Akalis belligerent. The state began to feel the heat as the Akali Dal launched a massive agitation for the implementation of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973. Although the Akalis did not create Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, they did not speak (…)

• 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: No nation for women, reportage on rape from India | Joydip Ghosal
  1 July 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Joydip Ghosal
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  No nation for women, reportage on rape from India, the world’s largest democracy
  by Priyanka Dubey
  Simon & Schuster India 2019 / 320 pages ISBN- 978-93-86797-09-4 __0__
  No nation for women: Reportage on rape from India, the world’s largest democracy is the outcome of an intangible confluence of the private and lived experience of suffering mass. It becomes amply clear that while authoring the book the writer unequivocally empathises with (…)

• Review: Raghavan on Vijayan’s Midnight’s Borders
  21 October 2022, by G Narasimha Raghavan

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India
  by Suchitra Vijayan
  Context (an imprint of Westland Publication)
  2021. Pages 320. Rs 699.
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  The Dawn, on Sep 14, 2022, carried a piece on the demise of Queen Elizabeth II, and the last line went this way: “The queen is dead; I hope the system of corruption and looting, of occupation and genocide that she represented perishes too”. Along with these cardinal debaucheries, one would add wanton (…)