Reviews for An Introduction to Earth Science: Heritage Sites

The average rating for An Introduction to Earth Science: Heritage Sites based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-15 00:00:00 William Raiman This book gets cited a lot by scholars who see postmodern critiques of Enlightenment reason as creating opportunities for fascism. While it's not really a close reading of postmodern philosophical texts, and shares some of the problems of other critiques of those, she does engage with the uses to which such theories are put in the justifications for Hindutva. Ultimately, this book is more useful for explaining the rise of that movement, including the ways in which it benefited from populist left version of anti-imperialism, as expressed in the writing of Vandana Shiva and others who seemed to circulate from what she calls the "Gandhian left" to the far right.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-20 00:00:00 Lisa Amundson This was a pretty good book on the rise of Hindu nationalism and its ideological similarities with the postcolonial arm of the academic cultural Left in its critique of scientific ideology, which is a relativist one. The position against the charlatanry of relativism is always welcomed. Nanda for me loses points because she accepts aspects of the philosophy of science that are now highly questionable, namely Kant's noumena/phenomena distinction and the sustenance of positivism. She is too quick to dismiss 'holism,' in which she lumps Hegel, which by itself took a star off the book's final rating. Finally, I feel as if she is a bit harsh on some of the better Indian postcolonial theorists such as Spivak and Bhabha (yet agreeing with her characterisation of their writing as unnecessarily 'verbose'), although Ashis Nandy and Dipesh Chakrabarty are certainly fine to critique in this regard.