SOURCE: Grace, Kevin Michael. “A Cold Eye.” Newsmagazine (National Edition) 30, no. 1 (6 January 2003): 46.

In the following review of Journey to Nowhere, Grace refers to Naipaul as an acerbic social critic.

[… The] late Shiva Naipaul … like his more famous brother, V. S. Naipaul, was a Hindu born in black Trinidad, then translated into an Englishman. He was the most savage social critic of his day, with a particular loathing of identity politics and the other fatuities that so confound us. He introduces Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, his account of the Jonestown Massacre, with this withering assessment: “The impression emerged of a culture overrun by taxonomists of all kinds, who, at a moment's notice, could supply tidy printouts that would explain any event. The categories and labels were to hand … Within a month or two, the incident would be exhaustively indexed and quickly forgotten.” Naipaul went to the...