Month: December 2012

Book Review: The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944-1958

Author: Mark Pittaway Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram This book by Mark Pittaway was published posthumously in 2012, with the efforts of his friend Nigel Swain who has written the Foreword. It unearths new findings on the roles that labor unions and other working-class structures played to effect change in Hungary in the face of their suppression by the state and foreign forces in and around the 16-year period between 1944 and 1958. Pittaway was a historian of socialism in Eastern Europe, particularly on Hungary, until he passed away after a heart attack at...

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Book Review: Making Sense of Data: A Practical Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining

Author: Glenn J. Myatt Publisher: Wiley-Interscience Book Review by: Nano Khilnani The process of taking raw data and converting it into meaningful information necessary to make decisions is the focus of this book. In many fields – such as biology, economics, engineering and marketing, to name a few important ones – organizations measure, gather and store data for specific purposes in electronic databases. They then tabulate and analyze that data to find distinct patterns which help them to solve problems or achieve their objectives. Each organization has a different objective. The data help a particular entity paint a picture...

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Book Review: Media Capital

Author: Aurora Wallace Publisher: University of Illinois Press Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram This book is about the history of New York City as the media and communications capital of the United States, signified by the construction of numerous large buildings starting from the 1830s. The study of such ‘media architecture’ and the people who owned the media organizations that wanted construct the edifices is the focus of this book. Many large news organizations in the past owned large or tall buildings in New York City. As part of newspaper rivalry, it was the media moguls’ way of asserting...

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Book Review: The Enculturated Gene

Author: Duana Fullwiley Publisher: Princeton University Press Book Review by: Paiso Jamakar According to Wikipedia, the prevalence of sickle cell disease – wherein the red blood cells become abnormally shaped like crescents instead of their normal round shape – is highest in West Africa. About 25 percent or one of every four people in that part of the world may be afflicted with sickle cell anemia. This region includes Senegal with a 2012 population of some 12,855,000 people. If we were to use the 25 percent figure, we come up with some 3.2 million Senegalese afflicted with sickle cell...

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Book Review: Ideas About Art

Author: Kathleen Desmond Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Book Review by: Laxmi Chaandi On page 34 of this book is a narrative that takes us to the heart of this question: what is art? Because the reactions to a picture or an object can vary greatly – ranging from one person calling it “beautiful” all the way to the other extreme, a person calling it “garbage” – it is difficult (at least for the non-artist) to objectively state what art is. On that page, the story is told of an artist walking on the beach of a small town who encounters there...

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