Blog post

Times Higher Education calls The Setting Sun a hybrid of “documentary approach” and “emotional quest”

Victoria Chow29 May 2014

Image for blog post entitled <em>Times Higher Education</em> calls <em>The Setting Sun</em> a hybrid of “documentary approach” and “emotional quest”
Writing for the Times Higher Education, Matthew Reisz reviews historian and postcolonial scholar Bart Moore-Gilbert's latest book, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets. In The Setting Sun, Moore-Gilbert traces his roots in pre-Independence India in an attempt to figure out if his deceased policeman father was a terrorist. Reisz calls it a "compelling narrative," saying it's the welcome first of the academic's more creative endeavors.



Praising Moore-Gilbert's book—a panoramic memoir that balances and crosses the personal and the political, the traditional and the modern, father and son—Reisz writes:

Even more striking, perhaps, Moore-Gilbert offers some evocative and often moving episodes from his childhood—his father teaching him the facts of life "with the aid of a cold sausage", beating him for some minor misdemeanour and carrying on at least one adulterous affair—as "evidence" for the kind of man Bill was. His emotional quest is totally integrated with the more documentary approach one expects from an academic historian ...

Visit the Times Higher Education to read the review in full.