RaveFinancial Times (UK)In an age of bigotry and narrow nationalisms, Ramachandra Guha’s new book is a welcome reminder that people’s opinions, passions and life’s work do not have to be dictated by their ethnic identities or their countries of birth ... In Rebels Against the Raj, the biographer of Mahatma Gandhi and historian of India has chosen to tell the colourful life stories of seven white foreigners ... The author is explicit about the purpose of what he calls his \'morality tale\' ... It is about the state of contemporary India that Guha is most aggrieved. He has been a vocal critic of Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and laments the rise of nativism and xenophobia in recent decades.
Ed Douglas
RaveThe Financial TimesDouglas’s quixotic and densely packed history of Himalayan peoples is not the book to read if you are looking for an easy contemporary analysis of the China-India confrontation on the roof of the world or the ecological catastrophe in the mountains that give birth to Asia’s great rivers ... Douglas has achieved something more valuable than describe current events: he has examined the ancient origins of those events with a scholarly yet entertaining synthesis of hundreds of years of history ... You can detect a slight bias in the weight of his coverage towards the art of mountaineering and also towards the complex history of Nepal — there must be more detail on political intrigues in Kathmandu and Gorkha than even the most dedicated Nepalese coup-plotter would want to know — but Douglas’s enthusiasm for diversions is infectious rather than obstructive.
Laurence C. Smith
MixedFinancial Times (UK)...[a] brave attempt to write a history of the world’s rivers from more than 4bn years ago until the present day ... At times, a little too brave. In trying to tell us everything about rivers, Smith deviates into areas of history, politics and business where his evident scientific expertise is of little use ... He is distracted by everything from riverside property developments in New York to events — such as the German siege of Stalingrad in the second world war — that are only tangentially relevant to his subject ... He does not do lyrical. Indeed, the best writing here is from John Steinbeck’s loving description of the Carmel river and its farms, sycamores, raccoons and frogs ... But Smith is passionate about his field of study, and infectiously enthusiastic about how our scientific understanding of rivers has developed over the centuries and allowed us to use or abuse this \'vast, arterial power humming all around us\'.
