China’s India War – Collision Course on the Roof of the World
By Bertil Lintner
Was the Indo-China war triggered by India erecting the outpost at Dhola, which, according to Beijing, was beyond the McMahon Line? Or had China been preparing for a great war with India for years before the Dhola outpost or even the 1959 arrival of the Dalai Lama in India.
The former had been one of the crucial points scholar and journalist Neville Maxwell highlighted in his much discussed book, India’s China War. In China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World, author Bertil Lintner has given a counterpoint.
Read Kallol Bhattacherjee’s review of the book here.
Inside Parliament: Views from the Front Row
By Derek O’Brien
After his stints as a sports journalist, advertising professional and quizmaster, Derek O’Brien entered Rajya Sabha as the Trinamool Congress MP. In a collection of essays, he provides a bird’s eye view of some key political issues the country has grappled with in the last three and a half years, including the impact of demonetisation, the unspent Nirbhaya funds and Arun Jaitley’s penchant to pass of any bill as a money bill.
As Smita Gupta observes, the timing of his book could not have been better, with general elections just a year and a half way.
Read Smita Gupta’s review of the book here.
Decolonization: A Short History
By Jan C. Jansen & Jürgen Osterhammel
In this comprehensive history of decolonisation, the authors shed a penetrating light on the “rapid transformation of the colonial empires into a plural world of sovereign states after the success of the struggle for national independence.”
Accessible to both a specialist and a general reader, this book is relevant for it’s in-depth coverage of political, economic, and cultural concerns with regard to postcolonial studies
Read Shelly Walia’s full review here.
Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup
By Jeff Koehler
In this expansive travelogue that traces the origins of Arabica coffee, considered to be the finest quality of coffee plant, Jeff Koehler takes you to the Kafa highlands of southeastern Ethiopia where, according to him, both Arabica coffee plant and coffee drinking originated. For Mini Kapoor, the journey was more about learning the moving history of Kafa than finding solutions to the various crises that haunts wild coffee plants world-wide.
“Koehler’s book,” she writes, “is a nudge to look beyond the high-street fetishisation of single-shot brews and survey the diversity of coffee-preparation traditions.”