Page 36 - Book Review

Kashmir from the ground up

Mr Geelani writes about the political aspirations of his own people. This is a position of great responsibility

Internet-speak isn't a bad thing

The message of Because Internet is that language is correct when sender and receiver understand a message in their shared context. That's it. It's social agreement all the way down

Book review: No clash of cultures in India during the Persianate age

Richard Eaton employs rich empirical detail to demonstrate that intellectual encounters between the Sanskrit and Persian worlds were not tied to any one religion and that the two were not hostile

The many personas of A K Ramanujan

Reading A K Ramanujan's diary is like meeting the many personas of the same person

Defusing the idea of Us vs Them

This looks to be the perfect moment for Mr King's resolutely humane book, even if the United States of the early 20th century isn't quite the perfect mirror

Ambedkar's shifting legacy

In his introduction, the author voices the Ambedkarite anger at Gandhi and communists

Behind the curve

The authors make a sincere attempt at recounting the Modi government's various economic policy initiatives in these five years

China's syndromes in India's ocean

Bertil Lintner's book The Costliest Pearl is perhaps the most comprehensive account of the contemporary geopolitics of the maritime Eastern Hemisphere

Book review: 'Blaming immigrants' busts most myths about refugees

Neeraj Kaushal uses her training as an economist not just to bust myths about immigration but recommend how things can be fixed

Recollecting a massacre

Mr Halder has used the tool of oral narratives, which is becoming more and more popular among journalists and historians, especially for documenting atrocities against the disenfranchised

Saving the world from AI?

This book is also an eye-opening tour of the contemporary method of opinion-formation as used by the Rationalists

Rewriting the rules of reporting

There are accounts here of reporting from war zones and, for example, of being embedded with the United States military during the Iraq War

Muslim politics in the age of Hindutva

Hilal Ahmed asks why Muslims have remained silent in the face of Hindutva provocations

Satire in the Sri Lankan soul

The book chronicles travels through some of the former hot spots on the island but its gaze lingers on aspects ignored by the professional war correspondent

When disorder sparks joy

Books are, after all, objects too, valued for their aesthetic and sensory affect

'Semicolon' is the story of a small mark that can carry big ideas

In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson reveals punctuation, as we practise it, to be a relatively young and uneasy art

Anatomy of a flood

Ms Ge seems to have conducted an endless number of interviews and she painstakingly reproduces them in her book. This is a powerful narrative technique

RSS' selective world view

The organisation reflects its idea of Hindu Rashtra by indoctrinating the Hindu youth and making them hate the 'enemies'

Half-hearted angst

Mr Khurshid engages with the question of citizenship only insofar as it concerns the equation between the individual and the state

From boss to coach

One suggestion in the book managers would do well to adopt is nurturing a strengths-based culture. It means they should focus on their team members' strengths rather than their weaknesses