Book Review

Articles

• African Soldiers Remember the Great War | Melvin E. Page
  29 May 2021

  Reviewed by Melvin E. Page (East Tennessee State University)
  __0__
  Bakary Diallo, Lamine Senghor. White War, Black Soldiers: Two African Accounts of World War I. Translated by Nancy Erber and William Peniston. Edited and introduction by George Robb. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2021. Illustrations. 200 pp. $17.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-62466-951-4
  __0__
  White War, Black Soldiers is a welcome addition to the growing effort to bring African voices from World War I to an (…)

• A Haunting portrait of forgotten Agariyas of Kutch: A Review of Anita Agnihotri’s "The Touch of Salt" | Bhavna Harchandani
  9 November 2024

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]
  __0__
  A touch of salt
  By Anita Agnihotri
  Translated by Arunava Sinha
  Penguin Books
  2024 / 180 pages
  ISBN 9780143465812
  __0__
  Reviewed by Bhavna Harchandani
  Anita Agnihotri’s "The Touch of Salt", masterfully translated by Arunava Singh, is a poignant and evocative novel that sheds light on the overlooked lives of salt cultivators in the Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat. The eleven-chapter book critically examines the (…)

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

  Reviewed by Raina Bhagat (Northwestern University)
  __0__
  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
  __0__
  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 (…)

• 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 (…)

• 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)
  __0__
  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
  __0__
  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 (…)

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

  BOOK REVIEW
  __0__
  Being Reshma Reshma Qureshi with Tania Singh
  Pan Macmillan India
  248 pages
  ISBN-978-93-86215-52-9
  __0__
  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 (…)

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

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Hannah Cutting-Jones
  __0__
  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 (…)

• Oppenheim on Lee, Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea
  5 November 2021

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Robert Oppenheim (University of Texas at Austin)
  __0__
  Pop Empires:
  Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea
  by S. Heijin Lee, Monika Mehta, Robert Ji-Song Ku, eds.
  Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press
  2019. 360 pp.
  ISBN 978-0-8248-8000-2. __0__
  The popularity and transnational reach of Indian popular media, most centrally Bollywood and regional Indian cinemas, have been subject to a great deal of academic attention. Somewhat more recently, (…)

• 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 (…)

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

  Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer
  __0__
  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
  __0__
  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 (…)