Fascinating...[Conrad's] art, which he defined as the capacity to make readers hear, feel and see, was able to capture the contradictions within empires and the resistance to them. This is the Conrad who comes alive in Jasanoff's masterful study. The Dawn Watch will become a creative companion to all students of his work. It has made me want to re-establish connections with the Conrad whose written sentences once inspired in me the same joy as a musical phrase. -Ngugi wa Thiong'o, The New York Times Book Review

Terrific...Weaving together biography, history, literature and her own travels, this fascinating, beautifully written work takes one of those literary giants frequently written off these days as a dead white male and reveals how he inhabited and grappled with a world startlingly like our own...[Jasanoff] explains why it's important that we grapple with figures like Conrad even if we don't share their values. History is like therapy for the present, she writes. It makes us talk about its parents. She's right as well as witty. And reading The Dawn Watch, we see how we are in many ways Conrad's children. Even if you hated 'Lord Jim' in high school, this book will make you want to pick it up again. - John Powers, NPR

Brilliant...Jasanoff is an insightful and imaginative historian...The book comes in the form of a biography of Joseph Conrad, but in fact through Conrad she tells the story of a whole phase in world history...Boundless curiosity is also an attribute of Maya Jasanoff...[Her] travels have given her an empathy and an understanding for Conrad, and also for the victims of imperialism, that breathe on every page of this magnificent book...This is the best book on Conrad since [Ian] Watt's. Maya Jasanoff has given us a Conrad for the 21st century. -Los Angeles Review of Books

Jasanoff is a splendid storyteller and stylist. -San Francisco Chronicle

A rewarding, richly textured read, sprawling in its reach and full of surprising cross-connections... Jasanoff...shares with her subject the knack of capturing human experience in poetic fistfuls of language, although it's sometimes hard to know where Conrad's magic stops and her own starts. -The American Scholar

The Dawn Watch is the most vivid and suggestive biography of Conrad ever written...[a] beautifully written book. - The Wall Street Journal

Enlightening, compassionate, superb -John Le Carré

With wit, nuance, and roving insight, Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World maps the massively influential and controversial author's life and work, finding that the themes of his time-dislocation and connection, immigration and xenophobia, power and powerlessness-uncannily mirror our own. -Megan O'Grady, Vogue.com's 10 Best Books of 2017

[A] brilliant study . . . The Dawn Watch will win prizes, and if it doesn't, there is something wrong with the prizes. -The Guardian

[Jasanoff] Skillfully integrates details of Conrad's life and accounts of his four greatest works, linking the challenges and forces that lie behind and within the novels to those of the 21st century...A powerful encouragement to read his books. -The Economist

This is an unobtrusively skillful, subtle, clear-eyed book, beautifully narrated...It is Jasanoff's warmth towards her subject that comes through. -Financial Times

[Conrad's] life story has been told many times, but Maya Jasanoff's stands out for its vivid and imaginative writing...she provides rich background details on multiple topics...her attempts to reveal the hidden springs of Conrad's fiction are often perceptive. -Sunday Times (UK)

Excellent-an engrossing, heartfelt exploration of the ragged frontier between public history, private experience, and imagination, from which the greatest literature is drawn. As Jasanoff charts the genesis of Conrad's most enduring novels of moral and political corruption, she makes us see his century-old dark vision o