Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌟 (4.9/5) Introduction Wendy Doniger’s For the Love of Stories is an intimate, wide-ranging and intellectually engaging memoir that brings together the personal and professional dimensions of an extraordinary scholarly life. Doniger, a renowned scholar of Hinduism and Sanskrit, has spent…
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4/5) Published by Niyogi Books in 2025 and translated by Chandana Dutta, The Mapmaker is a historical novel about William Smith, the largely self-taught geologist whose painstaking investigations fundamentally altered the way England’s geological landscape was understood. The narrative moves…
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4.5/5) Manu Joseph’s Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians is an unusual and provocative examination of Indian society. Instead of approaching poverty through conventional discussions of economic policy, welfare programmes or development indicators, Joseph begins with a…
Some books describe a place. Others attempt to make the reader feel a place. Santiniketan: Nature’s Gateway to Spirituality, a collaborative work by Bitann Chakraborty and Kiriti Sengupta, belongs firmly to the second category. Published by Hawakal Publishers in July 2026, the book…
Dzangpo Here they came, the last of the season. Dzangpo watched as the lights of the long jeep wound through the hillside, disappearing into blind turns and then returning, dots and dashes. The sun had already set over the hills…
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4.5/5) Amitava Kumar’s The Social Life of Indian Trains: A Journey uses the Indian railway system as a compelling framework to examine the many layers of the nation’s identity. Rather than focusing on trains solely as a means of travel,…
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5) One of the most difficult challenges in historical fiction is weaving authentic history into an engaging narrative without allowing either element to overshadow the other. Some novels become weighed down by historical detail, while others sacrifice accuracy for dramatic…
Exile is often portrayed as the beginning of a new life, but Herta Muller’s Traveling on One Leg challenges this assumption by revealing the emotional and psychological burdens that continue long after physical escape. Winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature,…
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5) A Wide-Ranging Exploration of Civilizations, Power, and the Fate of Nations Rajiv Dogra’s How Nations Fail: And the Unmaking of America’s World presents an expansive examination of the historical forces that shape the rise, dominance, and eventual decline of…
Reimagining Oskar: Hero of Danzig ‘Oskar’s goal is to return to the umbilical cord.’ Gunter Grass’ post war historical epic has been regarded by many as…
The credits rolledon a predictable “happily ever after” note.Bambi, triumphant, stood with his dad,seven dwarfs chased the Evil Queenoff the mountain’s ledgeand a generation of kidswere tucked into a million little racecar beds. A generation adrift in dreams,snoozed through their…
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4/5) Swami Mukundananda’s Ishavasya Upanishad is much more than a translation of one of Hinduism’s shortest Upanishads. It is an in-depth philosophical commentary that connects the timeless wisdom of the Vedic tradition with the realities and challenges of contemporary life. Although…