Suvarnadvipa comprises Malay Penninsula and Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Bali islands. These places came under the influence of Indian civilization, in remote past and gradually flourished into powerful empires, rich both in material attainments and cultural refinements. The history and culture of these places are both interesting and culture of these places are both interesting and instructive. Apart from the importance of these regions in themselves, the study of Indian civilization must be regarded imperfect as long as the achievements of Indians and local people who imbibed Indian culture in the Far East, are not taken into account. But very little about these regions was known till Dr. R.C. Majumdar drew our attention to this field of research through his pioneering works in India. Suvarnadvipa in two volumes is the fruit of one of his painstaking researches. The author has used all the available material brought to light by the Dutch savants and all native and foreign sources, viz. accounts of Chinese travellers and Arab historians and geographers. He has interpreted various stories that throw light on the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism in Java, Bali, and Borneo and studied and used local inscriptions as source materials. He deals with the Sailendra Empire and later Indo-Javanese empires with fullness and care. It is an interesting theme told in an interesting manner. The first volume is devoted to the study of the political history upto the downfall of the Hindu kingdoms in Suvarnadvipa, while the second volume deals with the cultural history. Subjects covered by the second volume are law and socio-economic conditions, literature, religions, use of Sanskrit, art and architecture in different ancient sites, etc. The value of the work has been enhanced by seventy-five plates of illustrations.

Robert Biel's Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement traces the history of Eurocentric--and anti-Eurocentric--currents in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, arguing that this distortion was key to the development and spread of revisionism, and ultimately to the failures of the communist project, in the 20th century. A work of intellectual history, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement explores the relationship between Eurocentrism, alienation, and racism, while tracing the different ideas about imperialism, colonialism, "progress", and non-European peoples as they were grappled with by revolutionaries in both the colonized and colonizing nations. Teasing out racist errors and anti-racist insights within this history, Biel reveals a century-long struggle to assert the centrality of the most exploited within the struggle against capitalism. The roles of key figures in the Marxist-Leninist canon--Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao--within this struggle are explored, as are those of others whose work may be less familiar to some readers, such as Sultan Galiev, Lamine Senghor, Lin Biao, R.P. Dutt, Samir Amin, and others. In pursuit of the anti-racist and anti-colonial goal, Biel has made an important contribution to understanding the development of Marxist thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, with strategic implications for our current revolutionary project.