Book Review

Articles

• Trump Marries Republican Politics to Authoritarianism | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  12 July 2025, by M R Narayan Swamy

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Democracy Awakening:
  Notes on the State of America
  by Heather Cox Richardson
  W H Allen/Penguin Random House
  2024
  Pages: xvii + 286, ISBN-10 ? : ? 0593652983
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  Is Donald Trump mad? Yes and no.
  It is easy

• All-encompassing Economic History of Indian Peasantry
  26 December 2009, by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

  BOOK REVIEW
  Peasant History of Late Pre-Colonial and Colonial India by Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri; Pearson Education, New Delhi; 2008; pp. xxv+939.
  It is always difficult to review a book by a teacher. Such a review always tends to become a tribute rather than a critical analysis of the content and arguments of the book. And I will not even try to pretend that I have been able to avoid that pitfall here, for I learnt my first lessons in the economic history of India from Professor Binay (…)

• Vergara on Hutchison, ’Workers Like All the Rest of Them
  11 June 2022

  Reviewed by Ángela Vergara (California State University)
  __0__ Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile by Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
  Durham: Duke University Press 2022 228 pp. $25.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-1489-8; (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4780-1395-2.
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  The history of Chile’s paid domestic workers has remained largely invisible. Labor studies do not mention their struggles and unionization efforts or consider the (…)

• Review of Takahashi’s Fukushima Futures | James W. Seabrooke III
  5 July 2025

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
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  Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape by Satsuki Takahashi
  University of Washington Press 2023. 194 pp ISBN 978-0-295-75134-4
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  Reviewed by James W. Seabrooke III
  Environmental Futurism and an Ethnography of Fishermen in the Joban Seascape
  Views of a sustainable future can become quickly obfuscated and disjointed for coastal communities when they are affected by life- and society-disrupting (…)

• Arun Shourie Tears Apart ‘Veer’ Savarkar and his Myths | M.R. Narayan Swamy
  15 August

  BOOK REVIEW The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts by Arun Shourie
  Penguin/Viking Pages: xviii + 543; Price: Rs 999 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar bragged, exaggerated and even lied. When the Congress battled the British, he did not mind collaborating with the colonial masters. He was adept in spewing hate. Scholar and veteran journalist Arun Shourie says one has to in fact search hard for revolutionary acts that can be traced back to Savarkar. It is such a man who got the sobriquet ‘Veer’ (Brave) (…)

• Review of Tripathi and Arun’s edited Volume on Democracy in Trouble | Bharat Dogra
  29 March 2024, by Bharat Dogra

  [fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEWblanc]fond noir]
  These are difficult times for democracy and this book on democracy in Hindi has thus been published at just the right time. Although it is mainly centered on India, it also ventures from time to time to comment on the situation in other parts of the world too.
  Edited by Arun Kumar Tripathi and A.K. Arun, two names very familiar to Hindi readers, this book titled ‘Jantantra ki Jarein’ (‘Roots of Democracy’) has essays by several writers known (…)

• Michael Degani Review of Mohsin’s, Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development
  19 October 2024

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development
  by Anto Mohsin
  University of Wisconsin Press
  2023. xvii + 245 pp.
  (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-34540-2
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  Reviewed by Michael Degani (University of Cambridge)
  By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Indonesia

• Kinzley’s Review of Greene, J. Megan, Building a Nation at War
  25 November 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  Reviewed by Judd Kinzley (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
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  Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II
  by J. Megan Greene
  (Harvard East Asian Monographs) Harvard University Asia Center 2022. xiv + 319 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-27831-8 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278318
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  During the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), Nationalist Party planners in China drew up ambitious (…)

• Review of Ellermann, Greg, Thought’s Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature | Paige Figanbaum
  9 June 2023

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Paige Figanbaum (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
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  Thought’s Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature by Greg Ellermann
  Stanford University Press 2022. xiii + 180 pp (cloth) ISBN 978-1-5036-2848-9
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  Greg Ellermann’s book Thought’s Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature, provides a thorough examination of the significance of nature as a concept. The author argues that without the romanticism movement, society would view and (…)

• Maddox on Schultz and Gawne and Peregrine, ’The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects’
  9 September 2022

  Reviewed by Gregory H. Maddox (Texas Southern University) __0__
  The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects by Ted R. Schultz, Richard Gawne, Peter N. Peregrine, eds. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. Cambridge: MIT Press 2022. 338 pp. $75.00 (paper) ISBN 978-0-262-54320-0.
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  In this edited collection, a group of primarily evolutionary biologists examine the biological adaptations of insect species that “cultivate” primarily fungi as well as other insects (…)