Adam Rutherford

Adam Rutherford, that prolific public intellectual of the life sciences, has now put his words where his heart has quite evidently been for a long time. In this, his 2018 book, The Book of Humans: The Story of How We Became Us (and it is perhaps aptly renamed in the 2019 USA version—Humanimal:  How Homo Sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature—A New Evolutionary History), Rutherford widens his remit from explaining the technical arguments and resultant ideas of evolution…


Reviewed by: Satyajit Rath
Radha Kumar

Radha Kumar’s Paradise At War is yet another addition to the large corpus of scholarship on politics As is par for the course with much of this literature, starting from a discussion on Kashmiri self-understanding of being unique and exceptional, stemming out of the region’s geographical peripherality and its relatively unbroken tradition, history, and mythology, the book moves to the post-1947 events that led to the rise of  insurgency in Kashmir in the late 1980s.


Reviewed by: Ellora Puri
Happymon Jacob

Happymon Jacob is a rising-star, academic and journalist, a columnist with The Hindu and anchor of a web series on strategic affairs at The Wire, besides teaching at a leading international relations faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. His book justifies the preceding sentence. He has taken pains in using escalation theory to interpret the data gathered on ceasefire violations since 2003 to reveal that India and the surrounding regions are sitting on a seemingly dormant, if not active, volcano.


Reviewed by: Ali Ahmed
Abhijit Dutta

Not many Indian writers have written books on Myanmar in recent times touching on its political history. Amitav Ghosh’s classic Glass Palace, even if in a fictional setting, brought to us graphic pictures of colonial Burma. Sudha Shah in her book The King in Exile gave a poignant account of the troubles undergone by King Thibaw, the last King of Burma, who was deposed and exiled by the British to Ratnagiri in India, with his Queen and descendants.


Reviewed by: VS Seshadri
Sriya Iyer

Religion in India with all its complications has been a subject of study for social scientists from a range of disciplines including sociology, history and politics. Iyer underlines an economic approach to the study of religion which ‘involves the application of economic theory and statistical methods to evaluate the role of religion in society at both micro and macro levels’(p. 11).


Reviewed by: Divya Vaid
Y.V. Reddy and G.R. Reddy

It is rare to find books which are easy to read even though they are dealing with relatively non-readable topics such as Fiscal management, Institutional development and Policy formulation. This book, while it pulls no punches on these usually convoluted issues, is both lucidly simple and yet packed with information, which is presented in a very readable manner.


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan