Anirban Ganguly

A controversial and devastatingly honest depiction of the demise of Europe. The Strange Death of Europe is the internationally bestselling account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Douglas Murray takes a step back and explores the deeper issues behind the continent's possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks and a global refugee crisis to the steady erosion of our freedoms. He addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away. Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end. This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe--one hopeful, one pessimistic--which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: "civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die."

When the house of history is on fire, journalists are often the first-responders, pulling victims away from the flames. Deep Halder is one of them. Amitava Kumar In 1978, around 1.5 lakh Hindu refugees from Bangladesh settled in Marichjhapi, an island in the Sundarbans, to start their lives anew. However, by May 1979, the island was cleared by Jyoti Basu s Left Front government in West Bengal. An economic blockade was imposed and there were many deaths resulting from the diseases and malnutrition that followed, as well as from violence unleashed by the police on government orders. Survivors of the massacre say that the number of those who lost their lives in Marichjhapi could be as high as 10,000, while the government officials of the time maintain that there were less than ten victims. How does an entire island population disappear? How does one unearth the truth behind one of the worst atrocities carried out in post-Independence India? Journalist Deep Halder reconstructs the buried history of the 1979 massacre through his interviews with survivors, erstwhile reporters, government officials and activists with a rare combination of courage, conscientiousness and empathy.