Over at The Wire, Raghunath Nageswaran has a review of “When Crime Pays.” He begins with an excellent quote from the sociologist Max Weber:

“There are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ politics,” said German sociologist Max Weber in his essay ‘Politics as a Vocation‘. Surely, many politicians have come to live off politics but what are the ‘incentives’ that encourage individuals soaked in criminality to take the plunge into it in the first place? At a time when we are witnessing increasing criminalisation of politics in our democracy, this question needs to be confronted head on and that’s precisely what Milan Vaishnav sets out to do in his book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.

You can read the entire review here.