Remarkable... Richard Eaton's brilliant book stands as an important monument to this almost forgotten world.

By rethinking this history as India's 'Persianate age', Eaton breaks free from religious sectarianism that projects today's tensions into the past ... His book is a fine tribute to India.

A brilliant, gripping, refreshing and scholarly history of India from 1000AD to the 1750s, analysing the power of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mogul Empire, its rise and decline and the rise of the East India Company - totally essential reading.

Genius ... India in the Persianate Age is Eaton's mature masterpiece. It will, undoubtedly, become the authoritative account of this most politically controversial period of South Asia's long history.

A richly researched, badly needed and wholly convincing account ... World history proves its worth.

Richard Eaton employs rich empirical detail to demonstrate that intellectual encounters between the Sanksrit and Persian worlds were not tied to any one religion and that the two were not hostile ... and does so with great panache.

Stunning. Wickedly perceptive, a scholarly masterpiece

Elegant and kaleidoscopic … this looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book

Deeply intelligent and immensely readable

The notion of cultural relativism was as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics, a shattering of the European mind. This remarkable book explains why. Franz Boas’s intuitions and insights, distilled in theory and practice by generations of scholars, a lineage that includes Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston, all brilliantly portrayed in the book, continue to inform contemporary anthropology, allowing the discipline to stand today as the antidote to nativism and the poisonous rhetoric of political demagogues. The entire purpose of anthropology, wrote Ruth Benedict, is to make the world safe for human differences. Never has the voice of anthropology been more important, and the arrival of this astonishing book can only be described as a gift to us all

Masterful. A vital book for our times

Engaging, deeply thought-provoking and brilliantly written. Charles King takes you on an unforgettable journey as daring anthropologists unravel the profound mysteries of culture and mankind

Vitally relevant

A motley crew of rebellious young female scientists, inspired by a scar-faced mad-genius professor, boldly set out on intrepid journeys to study strange far-flung worlds, and discover that their own home-world is stranger than they thought. Along the way, they have tempestuous love-affairs, scary adventures, swashbuckling battles against armies of racists, sexists and eugenicists. In the end, they change our moral universe. Sounds like a sci-fi fantasy movie? It happened, here on Earth, nearly a century ago. A fascinating and important story, beautifully told

As told very engagingly by Charles King, their research turned upside down the then unshakeable assumption that certain people were innatley superior to others, because of their skin colour, culture and gender

Nothing short of magnificent … in many ways a deeply touching book. Charles King’s prose is immensely readable and perceptive and lends itself perfectly to telling one of the most fascinating tales of twentieth-century science

No one until now has told this story of anthropology’s rise to [its] ‘master key’ status … Charles King’s book … does this with both subtlety and panache … A compelling account of mutliculturalism’s intellectual precursors

King's book tells this many-layered, mostly forgotten story cogently and compellingly ... a gift to the field of anthropology and to us all

King's book tells...[a] many-layered history, mostly forgotten story cogently and compellingly, and his collective method is a wise and welcome departure from the standard genre of a book focused on one towering individual... it also enriches our understanding of his [Boas's] female students, especially Hurston, enabling us to appreciate that she worked to develop innovative, story-driven ways of communicating anthropological insights... In breathing new life Boas's story he [Charles King] has given a gift to the field of anthropology and to us all

Franz Boas, whose achievements are set out in Charles King's The Reinvention of Humanity, recast the foundations of American anthropology. Against the prevailing political and intellectual orthodoxy, Boas and his students insisted that the basic unity of humankind was beyond dispute, and that within this unity there was no natural hierarchy of races, languages or cultures... That their ideas were found radical and strange is an indictment of their culture; that King's book seems timely is an indictment of our own

Fairweather tells this tragic tale in gripping fashion, bringing a new angle to the literature of the Holocaust

Brilliantly researched, Jack Fairweather's book is both gripping and powerfully written - a riveting and deeply moving tale of courage in the face of unimaginable horror