Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East
By David D. Kirkpatrick
David D. Kirkpatrick was in Egypt as The New York Times ’ Cairo bureau chief when the mass uprising, coup and counter-coup happened — Hosni Mubarak being ousted, Mohamed Morsy’s takeover, and the subsequent dethroning of the new President.
This is not a dense historical work that offers insights into the complex actors such as the military, the Salafis, the Muslim Brothers, liberals and leftists of Egypt’s upheaval. It’s rather a journalistic chronicle of Egypt’s chaotic years. And Kirkpatrick has succeeded in telling the story of Egypt’s tragedy engagingly.
The RSS: A View To The Inside
By Walter K. Anderson and Shridhar D. Damle
Walter Anderson and Shridhar Damle’s book The RSS: A View To The Inside is a useful primer for journalists seeking information on Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh resolutions or its affiliates. It seeks to argue that the Sangh has evolved over the last three decades, and that the meaning of Hindutva for its rank and file has got complicated.
It creates a definition of Hindutva in a vacuum and entirely exclusive of a plethora of academic literature around the RSS and Hindutva. The authors use economic development as an empty signifier when they claim that the discourse of development makes the BJP today inclusive for all, including Muslims. Development is a contested term with several possible meanings, but the book takes it as a given.
Mappillai: An Italian son-in-law in India
By Carlo Pizzati
Mappillai is part love story, part memoir, part philosophical musings... all of which are tied together with wry humour, some grumpiness and a large dose of acceptance. Carlo Pizzati met poet-dancer Tishani Doshi on a trip to India in 2008 and they got married in 2014 in what he calls “my big fat Jain Scottish Welsh Venetian Indian wedding.”
In between his accounts of coping with open defecation, villagers seeking ‘donations’ for a local temple, the role of the mango in Indian identity and more, Pizzati offers shrewd observations on caste and class differences, the yawning gap between the rich and the poor, attitudes of foreigners, bribery, etc.
Fear: Trump in the White House
By Bob Woodward
Bob Woodward, Associate Editor at the Washington Post , two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and co-author of the epochal investigative newsbreaks on the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, has in a sense mirrored the core insight of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury — that there is a frightening degree of randomness behind policy outcomes of the Trump White House.
It is evident that Woodward has pieced together a coherent picture of the unique operational style of the White House — apparently driven in large part by a concerted, clandestine effort by a group of senior officials determined to “block what they believed were the President’s most dangerous impulses,” even if that was tantamount to “an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the President of the United States and his constitutional authority.”
