Posts Categorized: Book Reviews

A review of Peter Stafford Roberts’ “The Sri Lankan Insurgency: Rebalancing the Orthodox Position” and Stephen Battle’s “Lessons In Legitimacy: The LTTE End-Game Of 2007–2009” by Peter Alphonsus, ‘The Sunday Observer,’ Colombo, May 13, 2018 It is a truth universally acknowledged that in May 2009 the Government of Sri Lanka won the war. This extraordinary… Read more »

by Charles Sarvan, ‘The Island,’ Colombo, May 5, 2018 Book Review: K. M de Silva, The Island Story: A Short History of Sri Lanka, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 2017. EPIGRAPH: Sri Lanka in the first few centuries after the early settlement was a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society: a conception which emphasises harmony and a… Read more »

by ‘Tamil Guardian,’ London, April 30, 2018 Rachel Seoighe launched her book ‘War, Denial and Nation-Building in Sri Lanka’, which explores how political discourse has been utilised to deny and re-engineer state violence in Sri Lanka, at an event in London last week. “People were dying in their hundreds, we still don’t know how many people… Read more »

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road by Michael Jerryson, Oxford University Press, May 2, 2018 It is said that the famous ninth century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan told his disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The deliberately confounding statement is meant to shock people out of complacent… Read more »

Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka Edited by John Holt, Hargrave Press, October 31, 2016  Proposes an alternative view of Muslims where, unlike in the Middle East, they are the victims of majoritarian politics Discusses events that invert the common stereotypes of Buddhists as pacifists and Muslims as violent jihadists 254 Pages | 5 illus. 6-1/8… Read more »

by Karthick Ram Manoharan, ‘Outlook India,’ February 5, 2018 The torture of incarcerated Tamils was not a betrayal of the Sri Lankan state’s Sinhala-Buddhist ideal, but that ideal being taken to its logical conclusion, writes Karthick Ram Manoharan. Excerpts from his afterword to Sri Lankan Tamil novelist Kuna Kaviyalahan’s ‘The Poisoned Dream’. Kuna Kaviyalahan’s The Poisoned… Read more »

Narrated With Poignancy And Hilarity by Sreevalsan Thiyyadi, ‘Outlook India,’ January 28, 2018 It was on this date nine years ago that immigrant Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada intensified protest against a “genocide” of their community in the Northern Province of the island-nation. Appadurai Muttulingam’s stories take a kaleidoscopic view on their everyday lives—and beyond… Read more »

by Abbey Steele, Cornell University Press, December 2017 ISBN-101501713736 ISBN-139781501713736 Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars’ work in Spanish to… Read more »

War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa by Scott Straus, Cornell University Press, 2015 “In the end, he concludes, whether interethnic strife results in genocide depends almost entirely on national leadership.” “…Strauss views threat by itself as an insufficient explanation, as elites have multiple options for responding to grave and immediate threats and because these… Read more »

by Francis Wade, August, 2017 Publisher: Zed Books Ltd ISBN: 9781783605279 Number of pages: 304 [Manufacturing the ‘other’ sound like Sri Lanka, anyone? Ed/] Book review from South China Morning Post here. From the Prologue: …These communal fissures weren’t entirely new, but to man outside observers, they were unknowns.  And before a deeper analysis of their causes began… Read more »

by Shankari Chandran Also author of ‘Song of the Sun God’ From the author’s website: The Barrier is a fast-paced literary thriller, set in a world destroyed by a virulent strain of Ebola and religious wars. It is 2040 and the surviving nations have been reorganized into the Western and Eastern Alliance. One side subjugates… Read more »

by Madurika Rasaratnam, Oxford University Press, 352 pages, published August 15, 2016 ISBN 9780190498320 ABSTRACT Why are relations between politically mobilized ethnic identities and the nation-state sometimes peaceful and at other times fraught and violent? This book sets out a novel answer to this key puzzle in world politics through a detailed comparative study of… Read more »

by Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan, ‘Colombo Telegraph,’ January 17, 2017 Book Review – Major General Kamal Gunaratne, Road to Nandikadal: True story of defeating Tamil Tigers, Colombo, 2016. Epigraph: Those who have power in the present, control the story of the past; and those who control the past, shape the future. ~ (Adapted from Orwell’s dystopian novel,… Read more »

Mangala Says Major General Kamal Gunaratne’s ‘Road To Nandikadal’ Is The Biggest Betrayal To ‘War Heroes’ by ‘Colombo Telegraph,’ March 18, 2017 Serious misconduct including incidents of violence carried out by the army has been highlighted in Major General Kamal Gunaratne’s ‘Road to Nandikadal’ book, said Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera recently. Mangala Samaraweera “This book basically… Read more »

The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka www.cambridge.org/9781107152236 AUTHOR: Benjamin Schonthal, University of Otago, New Zealand DATE PUBLISHED: November 2016 ISBN: 9781107152236 LENGTH: 320 pages Read the introduction at https://www.academia.edu/30783214/_Introduction_Buddhism_Politics_and_the_Limits_of_Law_ It is widely assumed that a well-designed and well-implemented constitution can help ensure religious harmony in modern states. Yet how correct is this assumption? Drawing on groundbreaking research from… Read more »