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A review by hoboken
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra
4.0
Outstanding. I've recently discovered this author, Pankaj Mishra. Maybe I spend too much time under my rock, but I think he should be much more widely known for his broad knowledge of history and deep understanding of the interaction between western and eastern philosophy and religion and the perspective he brings to it of someone who grew up struggling with both worlds.
If George W. Bush wants to know, as I believe he said, why "they hate us," he need only read this book. The relentless greed and vicious racism, the wars and exploitation, the broken promises and double dealing that the western colonizers practiced throughout Asia from the beginning of their dealings there were observed and absorbed by the boys and young men who grew up to be Gandhi, Nehru, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and through the generations to Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.
"The western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population." If you want to know how we got where we are now, it's a direct line.
Mishra ranges through Japan, China, Korea, Viet Nam, India, Afghanistan, Persia, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire from the late 1800s to the present discussing the lives and writings of the men who began to grapple with how Asia was to become "modern" and still somehow remain Asia.
"The fundamental challenge for the first generation of modern Asian intellectuals: how to reconcile themselves and others to the dwindling of their civilization through internal decay and Westernization while regaining parity and dignity in the eyes of the white rulers of the world."
Mishra knows so much history and can make so many cogent connections among time, space, and people; the writer he reminds me most of is the late Tony Judt, great explicator of modern European history. They would have made wonderful collaborators.
Mishra's latest book, just out, is Age of Anger, which brings this up to the present day. My husband's reading it now, and I'm fixing to as well as soon as he lets loose of it.
If George W. Bush wants to know, as I believe he said, why "they hate us," he need only read this book. The relentless greed and vicious racism, the wars and exploitation, the broken promises and double dealing that the western colonizers practiced throughout Asia from the beginning of their dealings there were observed and absorbed by the boys and young men who grew up to be Gandhi, Nehru, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and through the generations to Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.
"The western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population." If you want to know how we got where we are now, it's a direct line.
Mishra ranges through Japan, China, Korea, Viet Nam, India, Afghanistan, Persia, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire from the late 1800s to the present discussing the lives and writings of the men who began to grapple with how Asia was to become "modern" and still somehow remain Asia.
"The fundamental challenge for the first generation of modern Asian intellectuals: how to reconcile themselves and others to the dwindling of their civilization through internal decay and Westernization while regaining parity and dignity in the eyes of the white rulers of the world."
Mishra knows so much history and can make so many cogent connections among time, space, and people; the writer he reminds me most of is the late Tony Judt, great explicator of modern European history. They would have made wonderful collaborators.
Mishra's latest book, just out, is Age of Anger, which brings this up to the present day. My husband's reading it now, and I'm fixing to as well as soon as he lets loose of it.