At a time when India and Iran are mentioned together as countries whose nuclear aspirations have gained the ear of the world, Talking India furnishes a salutary reminder of other conversations that can take place between ancient civilizations and of the rich history, now only occasionally remembered, of the intellectual, cultural and political exchanges between…

Melinda Tankard Reist, editor, Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (Australia: Spinifex Press, 2006) Harriet McBride Johnson, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2005) Ninety years ago the Washington Post asked, “Who are the unfit?” and then answered its own question by noting that the…

Murambi, the Book of Bones. by Boubacar Boris Diop Translated by Fiona McLaughlin. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2006. This translation of Diop’s internationally acclaimed novel, originally published in French,[1] introduces one of Africa’s most important political novelists to an English-speaking audience. Murambi was born out of an initiative by African writers to commemorate and reflect upon the Rwandan…

Intriguing, entertaining and frighteningly plausible. That, in a nutshell, describes Kyle Mills’ political thriller, The Second Horseman, an ‘airport reading rack’ novel about a nuclear holocaust facing the Middle East as a unquestioningly pro-Israel America stokes Islamic fanaticism. Despite some loose ends and plot hiccups, this is by far the best of Mills’ works and…