The title Surya Vamsam, translating to ‘the family of the sun’, is a tribute to Sivasankari’s father, Suryanarayanan. ‘…overwhelming, exciting, thrilling, hurtful, shameful, moving, shocking and motivating’, and above all, ‘enlightening’ is how Sivasankari describes the many events and incidents in her life, and hopes that reading about them will bring ‘positive energy’ to her readers.
Volga, acclaimed feminist writer and editor of Telugu: The Best Stories of Our Times, notes that she swam through an ocean and ‘reached the shore holding on to the twenty-six stories,’ that ‘stand as witness to the time’. The resulting panoply features a diverse set of celebrated writers and dives deep into an array of important themes.
Thomas Piketty requires very little introduction. He is a Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French: École des hautes études en sciences sociales: EHESS), Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics.
Pinker follows his other popular writings (on language, violence, the enlightenment), with a lucid account of the importance and astonishing lack of reason in today’s world. Elegantly written, with abstruse ideas clarified (the difference between Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence, for instance), with choice quotes, anecdotes, charts, cartoons.
Indian legal scholarship is going through an exciting phase. Several books have emerged in the past few years which successfully combine meticulous academic research with a lucid, articulate style of presentation accessible to most laypersons. A surprisingly large proportion has been authored not by academics but practising advocates: Gautam Bhatia’s Offend, Shock, or Disturb (2016) and Abhinav Chandrachud’s Republic of Rhetoric (2017) come readily to mind.
To study what happens on the ground, called field experiment in policy research literature, requires developing a research style by creative policy research scholars who can redefine the role of methodological concerns that may lend itself to the disciplinary evolution of politics and policy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a wave of field experiments in Political Science from Yale University marked a sort of renaissance in policy research in two different ways.