Festival appearances and critical acclaim for David Van Reybrouck
Since the recent publication of David Van Reybrouck's Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by The Bodley Head in the UK and W.W. Norton in North America, laudatory reviews have been flooding in.
You can catch up with his public appearances on his relaunchedwebsite. If you missed him at the Hay Festival last month he'll be atThe Edinburgh International Book Festival on 23 Augustwhere he is part of the 'Voterama' strand, which the festival describes like this:
With more people voting in 2024 than in a single year ever before in history, Voterama: Elections, Democracy and Geopolitics explores both UK and international politics and the changing face of democracy itself. Leading voices Jess Phillips, Caroline Lucas, Alistair Campbell will help unpack the UK election, and David Van Reybrouck, Ingrid Robeyns and Ed Wong will broaden our horizons internationally.
David's influential book Against Elections was recently cited by George Monbiot in an Op Ed in the Guardian about participatory democracy, in which he called it 'excellent'. Monbiot writes:
Between 2021 and 2023,160 new citizens’ assemblies were set up to resolve difficult problems. Forty of these bodies are now permanent. They help address, for example, homelessness in Paris, urban design in Lisbon and climate policy in Brussels. In the German-speaking part of Belgium, a citizens’ councilforms the regional parliament’s second chamber.
A next step, as Van Reybrouck and others have suggested, could be to generalise this model, replacing one parliamentary chamber, such as the House of Lords or the US Senate, with a people’s assembly. This could evolve towards an entirely participatory system, largely based on sortition, in which everyone has an equal chance to make the decisions on which our lives depend. You care about democracy? Then you should hope to see an end to elections like this one.
PRAISE FOR REVOLUSI
‘Epic.’
— Ari Shapiro, NPR’s All Things Considered
‘An immensely readable new history of the nation [that] fills an important gap…. Van Reybrouck has visited just about every place that figures in Indonesia’s history, and evokes them with a narrative zest all too rare among historians.’
— Adam Hochschild, The Atlantic
‘An electrifying narrative…The strength of Mr. Van Reybrouck’s chronicle lies as much in the hundreds of interviews he conducted with very old participants in (and witnesses to) the war as in his impressive command of historical detail.’
— Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
‘This powerful account of the colonization of Indonesia takes the form of a people's history, using interviews with those who lived under―and sometimes defied―Dutch rule.’
— The New Yorker
‘[David Van Reybrouck] is a historian who gets his boots dirty. From remote Asian islands to Dutch nursing homes, [he] has tracked down eyewitnesses to Indonesia’s colonial period, producing the definitive account of a neglected epoch.’
— The Economist
‘This meticulous history of Indonesia spans several centuries, focusing on Dutch colonization of the archipelago and a drawn-out internal revolution that embroiled British, American and Japanese forces.’
— New York Times Book Review
‘An outstanding account of one nation's unsung fight for freedom… The firsthand narratives are enthralling… [A] magnificent book.’
— Todd Kushner, Washington Independent Review of Books
‘A long overdue and utterly compelling narrative history of the birth of Indonesia… It is as intricate as the waterways of the archipelago and yet it hums along, like a steamer on the Java Sea, propelled by the stories of its astonishing cast.’
— Alec Russell, Financial Times
‘A majestic and beautifully written ode to revolution that aims to remind us of the immense significance of this period of history… Compellingly written and marvellously translated.’
— Times Literary Supplement
‘Relating the story of this place is . . . a mammoth task, requiring a monumental research effort. This is what the Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck has achieved in his superb history.’
— Charlie English, The Guardian