India, July 19 -- Why We Get Angry and How We Should Respond to Provocation isn't the kind of self-help title that promises five easy steps to a calmer you, and that turns out to be the book's real strength. Journalist Narayani Ganesh - her name is often misspelled "Ganeshan" online, worth flagging if you're hunting for the book - spent years editing The Times of India's Speaking Tree column, and it shows: she treats anger less as a problem to be fixed than a subject to be understood from every angle she can find.

That range is the book's defining feature. Buddha, Krishna, and Mohammed sit alongside the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, with philosophers and psychiatrists brought in to round things out.

But Ganesh d...