Pankaj Mishra's “flair for the grace note is matched by a sometimes ferocious instinct for the jugular,†Jennifer Schuessler wrote in a review of his newest book in The New York Times.
“Now Mr. Mishra seems poised for a fresh round of intellectual battle,†she wrote, with the publication of “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.â€
Some on the right have dismissed the book as a polemic, but Mr. Mishra brushes aside the term. “If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction,†he said in a telephone interview from his home in London. And when it comes to the mainstream m edia, he added, “there are still very few people presenting perspectives other than that of the West.â€
“From the Ruins of Empire,†to be published in the United States next Tuesday by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is a richly detailed account of late 19th- and early-20th-century Asian intellectuals' often bitter responses to what one Japanese scholar quoted in the book called “the White Disaster.â€
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