First posted June 13, 2014 ‘A persuasive and a totally new way of thinking about a difficult subject, a truly significant achievement‘ Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2013) by Sumit Guha Reviwed by Tirthankar Roy EPW vol – XLIX No. 24, June 14, 2014) Three building-blocks structure this book.… Read More Book review: Sumit Guha’s new book on the history of caste
Sabrangindia Laced with quotations from Golwalkar and Savarkar of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha themselves, this work, now available in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and English, sharply critiques the far right’s worldview on caste exclusion and discrimination [Devanur Mahadeva, The RSS- The Long & Short of It is available in English; Price Rs 199. To obtain a copy… Read More How the RSS, Golwalkar & Hindu Mahasabha glorified caste: Devanur Mahadevan
Clara Mattei discusses her new book The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism “A must-read, with key lessons for the future.”—Thomas Piketty A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages,… Read More Clara Mattei: How Economists Invented Austerity / Anwar Shaikh: What Happens When Economics Doesn’t Reflect the Real World?
A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise by Daniel Immerwahr Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia… Read More Are we really prisoners of geography?
Michael Wood The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka; edited by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch. In September 1917, having just discovered he had tuberculosis, Franz Kafka took a break from his work at an insurance company in Prague and spent eight months with his sister Ottla in the village of Zürau, now called Siřem. He also seemed… Read More Cage in Search of a Bird
NB: This fearless intellectual, who defied the mighty Chinese Communist Party even as he fought for the freedom of the human mind, died in hospital on July 13, 2017, denied the right even to proper treatment. Beneath the image is an extract from Simon Ley’s review of Liu Xiaobo’s book, No Enemies, No Hatred. It… Read More The Legacy of Liu Xiaobo
First posted January 24, 2017 Jerzy Krzyżanowski The Captive Mind (1953) has been compared to the two most revealing and penetrating works on the same subject previously published – Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Read an interview with him in 2003, the year before he… Read More The Captive Mind revisited
Review: ‘The End of Tsarist Russia’ by Dominic Lieven By Serge Schmemann Aug. 30, 2015 Dominic Lieven’s stated reason for this contribution to the centenary literature on World War I is to place Russia “where it belongs, at the very center” of the war’s history. Certainly the war proved to be at the center of Russian… Read More Towards the Flame
First posted March 29, 2013 Derrida: A Biography, by Benoît Peeters Reviewed by Emily Eakin In May of 1951, at the age of twenty, Jacques Derrida took the entrance exams for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure a second time, having failed, as many students do, in his first attempt the previous year. Fueled by amphetamines after… Read More Derrida: The Excluded Favorite
First posted on June 12, 2014, upon learning of his passing NB: Stanley Rosen passed away on May 4, 2014, in Philadelphia, USA. (Read an obituary here). I never met him, but only managed to convey my regards via a couple of messages. I was introduced to his writing about a decade ago, and was profoundly moved and… Read More Stanley Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher
