A biography of Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984), the pioneering Tibetologist and Buddhologist whose body of work contributed to the shape and direction of several disciplines within Asian studies in the twentieth century, has long been a desideratum. This is not only on account of his influential contributions to Asian studies, but also because of the much debated—and still largely unresolved—issue of his collaboration with the fascist regime in Italy during the second quarter of the twentieth century, a period that saw Tucci's rapid ascendance in the ranks of Italian and international scholarship in concomitance with the consolidation of Mussolini's dictatorship. Unfortunately, the recent two-volume work by Enrica Garzilli does not fulfill this need, neither from the purely biographical perspective nor as an analysis of the importance of his political networking. This effort of almost 1,500 pages is at once prolix, contradictory, and fragmentary. It is confusingly laid out, repetitive, and in...

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