A provocative history of race, empire and myth, told through the stories of men who have been worshipped as gods - from Columbus to Prince Philip
Anna Della Subin is a writer, critic and independent scholar born in New York and now living in Dublin. Her essays have appeared in Harper's, the LRB, New York Times and New Yorker. A senior editor at Bidoun, she studied the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School. Accidental Gods is her first book.
Often colourful and bizarre, Accidental Gods opens new
perspectives, shines light on overlooked corners of our global
history, and conveys its powerful messages at first quietly, in
subtext, and then more and more explicitly... Always enlightening
and engrossing
*Lydia Davis, author of Essays One and Two*
Rich, witty, acerbic and often astonishing, Accidental Gods reveals
how terror and divinity are intertwined - in the colonial
enterprise, in present-day strong leader cults and nationalist
statecraft. A highly original, revelatory study, entertaining and
sobering at once as it identifies a persistent danger: the
mythopolitics that fails to distinguish between men and gods.
*Dame Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic and Fellow of All
Souls', Oxford*
Accidental Gods relates, with tremendous intellectual ingenuity and
resourcefulness, a new history of the modern world: how the quest
for divine sanction and spiritual transcendence remain at the
center of our ostensibly rational and secular political and
economic struggles.
*Pankaj Mishra*
Why do some people become gods? This is the question that Subin
asks in an impressive study that travels from the Caribbean to the
British Raj and back to the New World. This is no summary analysis,
but rather a provocative and innovative study of imperialism, race,
and decolonisation.
*Ruth Harris*
A bravura performance... a searching study of the relation between
the political and the divine written with great panache. Subin
returns us to fundamental questions about human beings, their
capacity for tyranny and violence, and their desire for
transcendence... A book to relish and to argue with, and a writer
to watch.
*Alison Light, author of Mrs Woolf and the Servants*
The best new non-fiction book I read this year... A stylish,
playfully rigorous intellectual performance worthy of Marina Warner
or Roberto Calasso
*Irish Times*
Anna Della Subin has lit upon a startling strand in the history of
the sacred... The book's strength lies in the sensitivity of her
analysis, which homes in on the inter-relations of power and
powerlessness, colonialism and nationalism: worship as a response
to terror, and a desire to propitiate
*TLS*
Phenomenal - erudite, provocative, scandalous, and comic and tragic
by turns
*Sunday Times*
A fascinating slice of history
*The Times*
Accidental Gods is a playful, ironic and ambiguous book about
religion, at a time when religion - outside of Dealey Plaza - has
grown as solemn as an owl ... [it] leaves us hankering, like
QAnon's unlovely faithful, for a wider, wilder pantheon
*Telegraph*
A fascinating tour through the endless diversity of the
divine...
*Spectator*
Engaging
*The Times*
A beautifully written, subtly crafted history... [An] inspiring
book
*TLS*
Fascinating... thoughtful and subtle
*The Irish Times*
A subversive history
*Guardian*
Remarkable... exceptional...
*Literary Review*
[Subin writes] with a poise and lucidity that allow full play to
the comic aspects of her subject, while considering the frequently
disastrous consequences...
*London Review of Books*
Inventive... Subinexpertly brings out the nuance and ambivalence of
deification
*New Statesman*
So eloquently portrayed... With her sense of the uncanny, the
ironic, the profane and the weird, Subin is a charming guide...
What Subin helps us to see is that at the very core of modernity
lies the white god, sweating in his pith helmet
*New Humanist*
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