Is it possible for a scholar to specialize in two countries as dissimilar as India and Israel? Perhaps a journalist might achieve fame by writing on many separate countries but it is rare for area specialists to stray from their own country or region. The authors of 0 Jerusalem and Freedom at Midnight exemplify journalists whose popular political histories…
If nothing satisfies a man so much as the esteem of one’s friends and colleagues, then Gorwala must indeed be a very happy person; the articles brought together in this volume felicitating him on his 75th birthday eloquently express…
Since the early 50s, coinciding with the setting up of the ‘national’ governments in many of the Third World countries, and perhaps consequent to it, several thousand intensive surveys have been made of single villages in those countries. This concern of academics in the ‘developing’ nations with rural realities…
The advent of the Janata Party was not foreseen when Bepin Behari published his book, but the Party’s emphasis since it came to power on what can be identified as a Gandhian approach to the problem of rural poverty in India makes the book topical. He quotes Gandhi: ‘I would favour the use…
Excesses of the Emergency is a much¬ battered cliche, but a post-Emergency excess—in both senses of the word—for which no Shah Commission is possible is the flood of books on it. These have come in all shapes and sizes and they do not please, as Keats said poetry should, ‘by a fine excess’…
Oscar Wilde said of Hall Caine that the latter always wrote at the top of his voice. This is a charge which can never be made against K.P.S. Menon. He does not create any problems of decibel tolerance to his readers. His own style of writing is perfectly modulated, controlled and decorous…