Age of Anger

Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely

John Banville

This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years

Joe Sacco

Incisive and scary.. a wake-up call

Nick Fraser, Guardian

Far from reassuring... his vision is unusually broad, accommodating and resistant to categorisation. It is the kind of vision the world needs right now...Pankaj Mishra shouldn't stop thinking.

Christopher de Bellaigue, Financial Times

This is a framework that pushes aside conventional, familiar divisions of left and right to focus on the profound sense of dislocation and alienation that spawned (and still spawns) movements ranging from fascism to anarchism to nihilism...a short book into which a lot of intellectual history has been packed.

Laura Miller, Slate

Stimulating... thought-provoking

Richard Evans, Guardian

A valuable book. Mishra's ideas are bold and initially discomfiting - it's a challenge to look over the head of the latest terrorist and try to dispassionately trace his rage back to Voltaire - but it's undeniably good to stretch intellectual muscles and test your own prejudices. Mishra invites us to hear the ugly, muffled shouts beneath the "drumbeat" of Western civilisation.

Julie McDowall, Sunday Herald

Mishra reads like a brilliant autodidact, putting to shame the many students who dutifully did the reading for their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating insight in canonical texts... no one has discerned better than Mishra just how far we still are from the top.

Samuel Moyn, New Republic

Around the world, both East and West, the insurrectionary fury of militants, zealots and populists has overturned the post-Cold-War global consensus. Where does their rage come from, and where will it end? One of the sharpest cultural critics and political analysts releases his landmark "history of the present

Boyd Tonkin, Newsweek

An original attempt to explain today's paranoid hatreds...Iconoclastic...Mr. Mishra shocks on many levels.

Economist

Along with quotations from Voltaire, Rousseau, and other familiar figures of Western Civ, Age of Anger includes observations from Iranian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other nations' scholars; their perspectives complement Mishra's deep understanding of global tensions....In probing for the wellspring of today's anger he hits on something real

Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek

Provocative...We'll need new philosophical frameworks to understand the phenomenon of political anger in a global perspective; what's fascinating about Mishra's novel reading is that it draws on familiar philosophical and literary touchstones while turning them on their head...A brilliant work

Eric Banks, Bookforum

A disturbing but imperatively urgent analysis

Bryce Christensen, Booklist

A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for 'truly transformative thinking' about humanity's future

Kirkus Reviews

Sensitive and illuminating....Makes a powerful case for the influence of a certain group of anti-rational and anti-commercial ideas which have influenced our world.,..Mishra's contribution is to show us how these ideas have become 'viral' and what that means for all of us.

Jonathan Steinberg, The Spectator

Incisive...Age of Anger, which was completed after the Brexit vote but before Trump's victory, reminds us that the dialectical movement between these two poles - between a desire to be oneself and a desire to belong to something larger than oneself - has been a feature of Western political life since the Enlightenment

Justin E.H. Smith, Harper’s

Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger...exemplifies his characteristic eloquence and erudition...Leaders who are struggling to process the present backlash against core aspects of globalization would do well to heed Mishra's plea to "remember the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires, and resentments."

Ali Wyne, The National Interest

An impressively probing and timely work...Highly engaging

Publishers Weekly

Scintillating...Age of Anger looks an awful lot like a masterwork. We're only a few weeks into 2017, but one of the books of the year is already here

Christopher Bray, The Tablet