Rudolf Mrázek. <i>Amir Sjarifoeddin: Politics and Truth in Indonesia, 1907–1948</i>. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2024.

A biography of Amir was especially necessary given his pivotal position as the Indonesian prime minister who signed the disastrous Renville Agreement of 1948, which made enormous concessions to the Dutch but was shortly voided by the Dutch military's Operation Kraai.These events broke the already tenuous unity of the republic's leaders and laid the foundation for the fratricidal violence-erupting most obviously at Madiun in 1948-that would plague the republic for decades to come.Meandering and musing in style, Rudolf Mrzek's biography of Amir is a pleasure to read, much in the vein of his Sjahrir (1994) and A Certain Age (2010).It is a book to "pleasure through," as if on a river cruise, to use a metaphor often deployed by Mrzek himself.This is not the kind of book young scholars have the luxury of writing, with its many musing allusions to Kafka, Kant, and Homer, but that makes it all the more refreshing to read.With a proven author of such incisive yet lyrical books as Engineers of Happy Land (2002) and The Complete Lives of Camp People (2020), the editors have been perhaps more permissive.Much of the pleasure comes from anecdotes both touching and wrenching, but this biography's greatest strength is the sense it conveys of young people caught between worlds in the interwar years -between the world of the Indies, with its freewheeling cosmopolitan intelligentsia circles of all ethnicities, and the world of the as-yet-unborn Indonesian republic, in which the pluralistic and trans-ethnic ethos of Dutch imperial culture (at least for those privileged enough to access it) would have no room to exist.Amir was one such person, and his experiences may well have been totemic.He was certainly not the only politician so torn by the painful necessities of gov