Book Review

Articles

• Review: Brian Elliott on Stethoscope by Anna Harris, Tom Rice
  29 April 2023

  Reviewed by Brian Elliott (Wright Patterson Medical Center and Wright State University) __0__
  Stethoscope:
  The Making of a Medical Icon.
  by Anna Harris, Tom Rice
  Reaktion Books 2022. 191 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78914-633-2
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  The stethoscope is perhaps the most recognizable icon in medicine. Its early nineteenth-century invention by René Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec is well described by historians and articulated in Laënnec’s De l’auscultation médiate ou traité du diagnostic (…)

• Review of Bhattacharya’s, Disparate Remedies | Asmita Sarkar
  12 January 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India
  by Nandini Bhattacharya
  McGill-Queen’s University Press
  Intoxicating Histories Series
  2023. xii + 257 pp.
  (paper), ISBN 978-0-228-01753-0
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  Reviewed by Asmita Sarkar (University of Oxford)
  In Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India, Nandini Bhattacharya investigates the historical roots of the contemporary pharmaceutical industry in India. Bhattacharya

• Review of Smith, Jessica M., Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility
  25 March 2023

  Reviewed by Sarah Stanford-McIntyre (University of Colorado Boulder)
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  Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility
  by Jessica M. Smith
  Engineering Studies Series
  Cambridge: MIT Press
  2021. Illustrations. 328 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-262-54216-6; (e-book), ISBN 978-0-262-36242-9 free (open access), ISBN 978-0-262-36615-1.
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  Published on H-Environment (February, 2023)
  Extracting Accountability is an account of how engineers in the mining (…)

• Powerful endeavour to counter the identity of the country on an ascriptive criteria | Naveen R Nath
  21 October 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
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  The Theory of the Basic Structure: Saviour of the Constitution and Democracy
  by Vijay Kumar
  Aakar Books Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 202 pages ISBN‏ : ‎ 9789350028278 Price: Rs.595/-
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  The theory of the ‘basic structure’ of the constitution propounded by the largest–ever bench of 13 judge by the Supreme Court in historic Kesavanand Bharti is in news, not only for 50 years of its formulation, but also for well-orchestrated attack on the theory by the former Chief (…)

• An extraordinary memoir of an acid attack survivor | Joydip Ghosal
  19 January 2024

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Being Reshma Reshma Qureshi with Tania Singh
  Pan Macmillan India
  248 pages
  ISBN-978-93-86215-52-9
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  Being Reshma, The Extraordinary Story of an Acid-Attack Survivor Who Took the World by Storm by Reshma Qureshi is haunting and tragic. She and Tania Singh penned the memoir. This book is not only an exposition on acid attack or her craving for justice. It is more than that.
  Tania Singh is the CEO of Make Love Not Scars. Throughout the book her empathy (…)

• A Dalit Activist
  8 February 2025, by Arup Kumar Sen

  Indian communist parties have often failed in weaving Indian identities into the language of left politics; Dalit or lower caste identities, gender-based identities, tribal identities are prominent among those. India

• Sustained from Below: Dalit Women and the Ambedkarite Movement’s Limits of Liberation 
| Theertha Praveen Panachoor
  25 June

  BOOK REVIEW 1. The Prisons We Broke, Baby Kamble, trans. Maya Pandit. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008. 2. We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement, Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon, trans. Wandana Sonalkar. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008. 
The history of the Ambedkarite movement in India has largely been written as a history of its leadership. Its constitutional achievements, its formal organisations and its founding figure are well documented. What has received far less attention is (…)

• A Black Woman’s Journey to White House | M R Narayan Swamy
  18 June 2021

  BOOK REVIEW
  Reviewed by M R Narayan Swamy
  Becoming
  by Michelle Obama
  published by Viking (an imprint of Penguin Books) ISBN-13:978-0241334140, Pages: 428; Price: Rs 999
  Long before she moved into the opulent White House as the US First Lady, Michelle Obama’s family lived in the poor side of Chicago, one of the few who didn’t own a home. The lack of air-conditioning made the apartment unbearably hot in the afternoons. Michelle, her brother and their parents were packed into less (…)

• Review of Weiner’s The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  23 August 2025

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

• Abou-Nemeh’s Review of Sandrine Parageau’s The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France
  19 January 2024

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Catherine Abou-Nemeh (Victoria University of Wellington)
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  The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France. by Sandrine Parageau
  Stanford: Stanford University Press 2023. viii + 254 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5036-3256-1 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5036-3531-9
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  What role did ignorance play in René Descartes’s philosophy and the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society of London? How did enduring Christian anxieties about the pursuit of ignorance (…)