Book Review

Articles

• The lessons from Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday misery | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  26 July 2024, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir] __0__
  Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community
  by Rohan Gunaratna
  Penguin Books Pages: lxxvi + 238 Price: Singapore$ 28.90 __0__
  It was sheer incompetence at the highest level of governance that helped the Islamic State to devastate Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in 2019, slaughtering 275 people and injuring almost 600. The suicide bombings were the worst terrorist onslaught by the IS outside the Iraqi (…)

• 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 (…)

• Review: Steiner on Anctil’s ’Luminous Creatures: The History and Science of Light Production in Living Organisms’
  7 January 2023

  Reviewed by Katharina Steiner (University of Geneva)
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  Luminous Creatures: The History and Science of Light Production in Living Organisms by Michel Anctil
  Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
  2018. 488 pp. ISBN 978-0-7735-5312-5
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  With his book on the history and science of light production in living animals, Michel Anctil offers a rich history of a phenomenon that has triggered not only superstition, optical illusions, and imaginative worlds but also the (…)

• Teresa Huhle. Review of Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II by Rebecca Herman
  20 April 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]
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  Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America
  by Rebecca Herman
  Oxford University Press
  2022. 320 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-753187-7
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  During World War II, the United States Army deployed aircrafts and troops in sixteen Latin American countries, utilizing existing defense sites, but more importantly, constructing numerous new bases. Focusing on (…)

• Review of Gareth Leng, Rhodri Ivor Leng, The Matter of Facts | Jessica R. Avery
  19 August 2022

  BOOK REVIEW
  __0__ The Matter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evidence in Science
  by Gareth Leng, Rhodri Ivor Leng
  Cambridge: MIT Press 2020. Illustrations. 376 pp (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-04388-5; (e-book), ISBN 978-0-262-35828-6.
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  Reviewed by Jessica R. Avery (DePaul University)
  As the title suggests, Gareth Leng and Rhodri Ivor Leng’s collaborative book, The Matter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evidence in Science, presents an insightful, critical, and (…)

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

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]
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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 (…)

• 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 (…)

• 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 (…)

• Thomas Klikauer’s Review of Machines Behaving Badly
  11 November 2023

  Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer
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  Machines Behaving Badly:
  The Morality of AI
  by Toby Walsh
  La Trobe University Press and Black Inc. Press, Collingwood
  2022. 275 pp.
  pb ISBN 9781760643423
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  Toby Walsh begins Machines Behaving Badly by making clear that ‘[i]n reality, artificial intelligence is [not a] conscious robot […] We cannot yet build machines that match the intelligence of a two-year-old […] program computers […] do narrow, focused tasks’ (1). Like a coffee maker (…)

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

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/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 (…)