High-falutin' writing

A friend forwarded me an article about a new historical book on how "sramanic" religions like Buddhism played an important role in South India. The book certainly sounds interesting, but the review was very, very hard to read. I had to read it twice before I got what it was saying. It appeared that the writer wouldn't use 1-syllable words when he could find 5-syllable ones to say the same thing. Sort of Hemingway in reverse. Sample paragraph from the review:

The empirical pre-eminence in the study of history in inscription-rich Tamil Nadu and a modern outlook on historiography combine to provide a fresh understanding of the past in a book launched here on Tuesday.

The ironic thing is that The Hindu, the paper in which the review appeared, is read by a bunch of folks for whom English is, at best, a second language. What are the writers of pieces like this thinking?