Anger: 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,........

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