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  • Review of Bailey’s The Architecture of Empire | Rachael Maxon
    1 February 2025

    [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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    The Architecture of Empire: France in India and Southeast Asia, 1664-1962
    by Gauvin A. Bailey
    McGill-Queen’s University Press
    2022. 488 pp.
    (cloth), ISBN 978-0-228-01142-2
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    Reviewed by Rachael Maxon (University of Iowa)
    Bailey

  • When America rained horror on Japan
    30 August 2025, by M R Narayan Swamy

    [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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    The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb and the Fateful Decision to Use It
    by Iain MacGrego
    Constable/Great Britain (Hachette India)
    2025
    ISBN-10: ?1408719517 / Pages: 429; Price: Rs 799
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    It was finally left to a crusading American journalist to puncture Washington

  • Review of Iqbal S. Hasnain’s Fault Lines In The Faith | P S Jayaramu
    1 June 2024

    [fond noir][fond blanc]BOOK REVIEWfond blanc]fond noir]
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    Fault Lines In The Faith: How events of 1979 shaped the Islamic World
    by Iqbal S. Hasnain
    Rupa
    2023 Pp 279, Price ₹395.
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    Iqbal Syed Hasnain, the author of this book, is a former Pro-Chancellor of Jamia Hamdard and former Vice Chancellor of Calicut University, besides the other assignments he handles. Hasnain has varied interests and the same can be discerned from his interests in Himalayan glaciers and climate (…)

  • 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 (…)

  • Journey of a city | Joydip Ghosal
    7 September 2024

    [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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    Bombay After Ayodhya, A City in Flux by Jitendra Dixit
    HarperCollins Publishers India
    P- ISBN – 978-93-5629-411-0
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    Bombay After Ayodhya, A City in Flux by Jitendra Dixit documents the change in city’s character and landscape . This book stands as a testament to author’s in- depth knowledge of the city. He loves the city and its people from the core of his heart. He knows every nooks and corner of the city. Rasheed Kidwai (…)

  • Ghachar Ghochar Waited for Me to Grow Up
    17 August 2025, by Disha

    [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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    Ghachar Ghochar
    by Vivek Shanbhag
    HarperCollins Publishers India
    2015
    124 pages
    ISBN-10: ? 9789351776178
    ISBN-13: ? 978-9351776178
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    Sometimes a story does not unfold for the sake of entertainment or instruction but simply sits in a room, quietly existing, until you are ready to meet it on its own terms. Ghachar Ghochar is not a loud novel, nor is it in a rush to deliver a climax or resolution. It simply waits, almost (…)

  • Israel is reaping what it has sowed | M.R. Narayan Swamy
    1 March 2024

    [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir] __0__
    The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine by Michael Scott-Baumann
    Picador India; Pages: 279; Price: Not given
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    After the killing of an Israeli woman and her two children in a Palestinian grenade attack, Israeli forces entered the West Bank village of Qibya in October 1953 and killed 69 of its inhabitants, most of them women and children. This was part of a policy Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion put in place to force (…)

  • Sri Lanka’s natural beauty amid fractures | M.R. Narayan Swamy
    15 July 2023, by M R Narayan Swamy

    BOOK REVIEW
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    Upon a Sleepless Isle: Travels in Sri Lanka by Bus, Cycle and Trishaw
    by Andrew Fidel Fernando
    Picador India (PP, 2023), Pages: 267; Price: Rs 499 __0__
    Call it an irony but tourists, primarily from the West, never stopped exploring Sri Lanka all through the period the country was caught up in one of the longest running and blood-soaked ethnic conflicts. The reason was simple. The battle for a Tamil homeland was largely confined to the northern and eastern (…)

  • Sweeping Western Sanctions Fail to Cripple Putin | M.R. Narayan Swamy
    2 November 2024, by M R Narayan Swamy

    [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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    Punishing Putin: Inside the Global Economic War to Bring down Russia
    by Stephanie Baker
    Mudlark
    Pages: xiv + 351; Price: Rs 699
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    When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it heralded the largest land war in Europe since World War II. But there was no way the West was going to go for a direct military confrontation with a country with more nuclear warheads than any other. That would have been (…)

  • Review: Women’s Labor in Bangladesh
    15 April 2022

    Reviewed by Samita Sen
    __0__ An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal.
    by Poulomi Saha
    New York: Columbia University Press Gender and Culture Series 2019 | Illustrations. 344 pp. $65.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-231-19208-8. __0__
    The book under review, An Empire of Touch by Poulomi Saha, is organized around three parts. The first part is thematic, what Saha terms a "fabric genealogy," a running thread of textiles, starting with the now-extinct dhakai (…)