Book Reviews

Natasha Walter calls for a feminism rooted in solidarity and renewal

Ms Walter, who worked with refugee women, heard countless stories of women who had fled across borders for their safety. These were stories from war zones, prison camps and detention centres

The Founder Manual: A practical guide to building enduring Indian start-ups

Utsav Somani's The Founder Manual offers practical, India-focused guidance on building, funding, scaling and exiting startups without the hype

China's Wars: A useful guide to China's paradox of power and insecurity

Vijay Gokhale's China's Wars examines Beijing's use of military coercion and diplomacy, offering insights into China's strategic behaviour and its implications for India

Buildit: The inside story of Blinkit's rise and India's quick-commerce boom

Albinder Singh Dhindsa's Buildit traces Blinkit's rise from a small startup to a quick-commerce giant, offering insights into entrepreneurship and India's digital economy

A revealing chronicle of Trump's imperial presidency and its contradictions

Regime Change chronicles Donald Trump's turbulent second term, portraying a presidency shaped by power, spectacle, loyalists and mounting political challenges

Stephen Alter's book captures the monsoon in all its infinite variety

Stephen Alter's The Fragrance of Rain blends nature writing, ecology and culture to capture the beauty, history and complexity of India's monsoon

Indira Jaising's memoir locates justice in constitutional belonging

Running through the memoir is a sustained inquiry into the meaning of justice in a multilingual, multifaith, and deeply unequal society

Yengde's book is a study of how caste survives by crossing borders

Caste has waited out empires, outlasted reform movements, survived the constitutional abolition of untouchability, adapted to the diaspora, found new languages in new countries

Dark Coloured Waters: A river memoir turns conflict into layered memory

Danesh Rana's journey along the Chenab blends memoir, conflict, history and culture, revealing the many stories carried by one of the subcontinent's most evocative rivers

China's challenge to US tech supremacy grows as AI race reshapes rivalry

Geopolitical tensions and the US steps to keep China from catching up in AI and in chip technology has created two distinct worlds

Iran's many revolutions: A history of resistance, repression and hope

The authors render the early years of the revolutionary movement through the life of one participant, the Islamic scholar Mehdi Karroubi

For a room of one's own: Manil Suri's moving memoir of Bombay and belonging

In his memoir, A Room in Bombay, Manil Suri revisits his Bombay childhood, family struggles, sexuality and the letters that shaped his life

Ticket to Kerala: Tracing Malayalam cinema's rise to a national force

The book by S R Praveen, who has been a film critic for many years, is a culmination of years spent watching, questioning and writing about cinema

Lucky People: A breezy neuroscience take that misses wider realities

Does luck fall equally on everyone? You might not think so, but Japanese neuroscientist Nobuko Nakano argues that this is the case

A World of Resistance: What's driving India's antibiotic overdose crisis

The very drugs that transformed India's health, agriculture, and development now threaten to undermine all three

Inside the mind of the RSS sevak: A rare glimpse into Sangh's inner world

Julia Eckert's outstanding study on the Shiv Sena explores how the organisation grew via arbitrage in areas that the state could not/did not reach

The scandal that roiled the chess world, from cheating claims to bestseller

Ben Mezrich's Checkmate turns the Magnus Carlsen-Hans Niemann chess scandal into a gripping narrative, but factual errors undermine its credibility

The Power and the Glory: Geopolitics, FIFA and the beautiful game

Jonathan Wilson's The Power and the Glory traces how the FIFA World Cup evolved from a football tournament into a global stage for power, politics and profit

Indonesia: A rich portrait of the archipelago's layered culture, identity

Diplomat-scholar Aftab Seth offers a glimpse into Indonesia's cultural landscape and, in the process, transcends the narrow confines of one's own upbringing

'Bharat Bluff' shows how trust became one of the weakest links online

Bharat Bluff is filled with first-person accounts of scams that allow readers to comprehend the gravity of India's scam economy beyond data