A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development

"A Carnival For Science is an insightful and elegantly written collection of essays from one of India’s finest post-modern critics of science. Trained in the sociology and philosophy of science, Visvanathan has devoted his attention in this book to the “development agenda” of modem science, explicitly identifying modernism, development, and science as interlinked and potentially genocidal forces in the world. In making this argument, Visvanathan argues that science and politics are inseparable, and to localize science would also have the effect of decentralizing government. In spite of the polemical tone of his thesis, Visvanathan’s writing is often entertaining and even delightful as his essays move from a fictional account of a crisis of simultaneously blooming bamboo clumps over thousand of acres of forest (and the attendant rats which come to feed on it) to rewriting Gandhi to Oppenheimer and atomic physics." -- Mike Lewis, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Article 30, Volume 1999, Issue 18, 1999, pp 119-21