Bland Fanatics:Liberals, Race and Empire
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Hardback
One of the most acclaimed essayists writing today on the political hysteria plaguing the West
Decades of violence and chaos have generated a political and intellectual hysteria—ranging from imperial atavism to paranoia about invading or hectically breeding Muslim hordes—that has affected even the most intelligent in Anglo-America. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines this hysteria and its fantasists, taking on its arguments and the atmosphere in which it has festered and become influential. In essays that grapple with colonialism, human rights, and the doubling down of liberalism against a background of faltering economies and weakening Anglo-American hegemony, Mishra confronts writers from Jordan Peterson and Niall Ferguson to Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. With a newly written introduction, these essays provide a vantage point from which to look seriously at the current crisis.
Reviews
literary iconoclast [and] maverick political thinker—edgy, sly and idiosyncratic—weaving a kind of witchcraft with the wounded frankness of prose
Bracing ... The first essential read of the Trump Era
This important, erudite book proves the deepest roots of our inflamed moment
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An original attempt to explain today's paranoid hatreds ... Insightful ... Iconoclastic ... Mishra shocks on many levels
, The Economist -
A searing attack on the assumption that modernity is synonymous with progress
, Wall Street Journal -
Urgently vigorous ... It is Age of Anger's singular ambition to give the world as we have it a past, a how-we-got-here, a where-the-mistakes-lie ... The book marks an important advance in our most urgent discourse
, The National -
A bowel-churning kick in the guts ... [Pankaj Mishra's] vision is unusually broad, accommodating and resistant to categorisation. It is the kind of vision the world needs right now
, Financial Times -
The ideal writer to diagnose our current moment
Los Angeles Review of Books -
Bracing and illuminating ... Mishra writes with ... style, energy and incision ... [He] dwells in the realm of ideas and emotions, which get short shrift in most accounts of global politics ... A decent liberalism would read sharp critics like Mishra and learn.
New York Times Book Review