Dazzling review!
An intellectual nonconformist, Roy has achieved something remarkable: he has written a book on identity politics that neither condemns nor embraces it, but is instead a nuanced cultural dissection of its origins and its contradictions. His tone, conveyed into English by translators Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, is melancholic, but never angry. He offers explanations, not polemics.
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La presse en parle :
A The Hindu Top 10 Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691206806/modis-india
Translated by Cynthia Schoch
Awards and Recognition
Christophe Jaffrelot, Winner of the Prix Raymond de Boyer de Sainte-Suzanne, Académie française (for the original French edition)
Financial Times Best Books of 2021: Politics
A The Hindu Top 10 Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year
Awards SciencesPo
http://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/en/content/2019-outstanding-academic-titles-choice-magazine
Every year in the December issue, in print and online, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. Read more about the award.
Two books from the CERI Comparative Politics and International Studies series with Hurst and Oxford University Press have been selected among the 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles list.
Yemen and the World. Beyond Insecurity by Laurent Bonnefoy, translated by Cynthia Schoch
The Survival of the Jews in France. 1940-44 by Jacques Semelin,Translated by Cynthia Schoch & Natasha Lehrer
Jihad and Death
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...Roy’s latest salvo, Jihad and Death, develops themes that he broached in the press following the Paris attacks of November 2015, notably his argument that they didn’t demonstrate the radicalisation of Islam so much as nihilism in search of an alibi. The new book is in many ways a bravura outing, pithy, prosecutorial, and informed by the author’s global approach to knowledge and thought. (Roy’s first book was on the influence of Confucianism). It is also appealingly French – a quality retained in Cynthia Schoch’s sensitive translation. Where else have Isis’s beastly publicity videos been described as a “Sadean … discourse on itself”?...
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Purify and Destroy
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...The subject of Purify and Destroy is ‘massacre‘, a word whose original meaning is related to the slaughter of animals, and which the book uses to explore three instances of large-scale, politically motivated murder: the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The wealth and diversity of knowledge, factual details, conceptual tools and analytical insight woven together in this book make it an original and exceptionally creative con- tribution to the study of genocide. (Indeed, the book goes so far as to question the propriety of the term as we currently use it). Easy to read, it is well served by Cynthia Schoch’s excellent translation into English...
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Survival (2008) Book Reviews, 50:1, 217-241,
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...There are many reasons why the book deserves attention, aside from the limpid readability of Cynthia Schoch’s translation. His approach is genuinely compara- tive and multi-disciplinary, bolstered by an excellent grasp of the extant literature in French, English and German on the Holocaust, Rwanda and Bosnia, as well as on the general themes explored alongside his case studies…
