Book Review

Articles

• 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 (…)

• 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 (…)

• 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 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 (…)

• Cutting-Jones Review of Katz-Rosene, Ryan M.; Martin, Sarah J., eds., Green Meat
  29 October 2021

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Hannah Cutting-Jones
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  Green Meat? Sustaining Eaters, Animals, and the Planet
  by Ryan M. Katz-Rosene, Sarah J. Martin, eds.
  April 2020
  272 pp.
  ISBN 9780228001331
  Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. __0__
  Green Meat? takes on a critically important and complex issue: whether meat can or should be part of a sustainable food system in a future clouded by climate change. Central to the debates laid out in this collection of essays are competing (…)

• Review of Vijayan’s India vs. RSS – a book against majoritarian agenda | Joydip Ghosal
  20 April 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]
  In the book India vs RSS by Pinarayi Vijayan asserts that the battle for democratic and secular India against totalitarian RSS is winnable. CPI (M) leader Pinarayi Vijayan is the chief minister of Kerala. He served as Minister of Electric Power and Cooperatives from 1996 to 1998. He was born in Kannur which was the “ground zero of RSS terror.”
  The majoritarian ideology is steeped in hatred and parochialism. Vijayan in this book shows (…)

• 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 (…)

• 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 (…)

• 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: Ramesh on Dewan’s Misreading the Bengal Delta
  12 November 2022

  Book reveiw by Aditya Ramesh*
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  Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh
  by Camelia Dewan
  University of Washington Press 2021. Illustrations, maps, tables. 254 pp. (cloth) ISBN 978-0-295-74960-0; $30.00 (paper) ISBN 978-0-295-74961-7.
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  Frequent headlines emanating from South Asia on extreme weather events are now unmissable, for example, Pakistan’s devastating floods, with some sources estimating a third of the (…)