HR ChallengeDynamics of value creation and competitiveness through people, edited by Sudatta Ranasinghe and Ajantha Dharmasiri, June 2013. 345 pages. Hardcover. Institute of Personnel Management (IPM), Sri Lanka. Reviewed by: Apu Akbar, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada Human resources (HR) are the most valuable, yet vulnerable, asset that organizations, public or private, leverage to achieve their goals. There are many areas and perspectives of HRM (human resource management) as it relates to human beings. The book titled “HR Challenge: Dynamics of Value Creation and Competitiveness Through People” discusses the issues and prospects of HRM (human resource management) focusing on Sri Lankan and South Asian perspectives. HR professionals, if any, are looking for a thought-provoking, prudent and practically oriented resource to better understand the conundrums of different types in HR practices, the book titled “HR Challenge: Dynamics of Value Creation and Competitiveness Through People” should be the right choice to quench HR professionals. . This book is a compilation of 12 articles edited by Sudatta Ranasinghe and Ajantha Dharmasiri. Each article in this edited book is unique not only in its quality, but also in the sense that each article covers different areas of HR functions necessary for strengthening organizational competitiveness. A brief overview of each article is presented below. The book begins with the first chapter containing an article titled “Human Resource Challenges in a Developing Economy: Towards Multiple Roles of Human Resource Professionals in a Competitive Business Environment” by Sudatta Ranashinghe. The author describes human resource issues focusing on hiring and retaining employees in different sectors in Sri Lanka, covering an article medium......that HR practices are always context based depending on sociocultural, political and economic factors. No new theories are proposed in this book. This is a collection of easily understandable literature that, without any confusion, will serve as a supporting resource for HR professionals. However, in most cases, excessive narration of context and literature review can confuse readers' attention. Although this is not a serious drawback, it could be easily overcome. Additionally, by avoiding over-narration, the size of the articles as well as the book could be reduced, which would definitely help keep the price of the book lower and make it more accessible to people. Since ambiguity, paradox and multifaceted problems constitute the regular challenges of HR practice, a less serious drawback of this nature will hopefully not stand in the way of the acceptability of this book..