Irrespective of the context, Paul Mus has left an impact wherever and with whomever he has worked. An erudite man of action, he is among the few to have left a significant and positive footprint on Asian, French and Anglo-Saxon research. These contributions are reflected by the diversity of contributions and contributors found in David Chandler and Christopher E. Goscha's Paul Mus (1902–1969): L'espace d'un regard. The book emerges from a workshop held in May 2004 and is dedicated to the work (and life) of Paul Mus, a social scientist, an officer, a diplomat and a genuine humanist. Participants of the workshop and in the publication of this book bore testimony to the diversity of Mus's intellectual trajectory, from his position at the École Française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in Indochina to his teaching at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, and through his years of military and political activities during the Second World War and the first Indochina war. A number of the contributors knew Mus personally, such as Georges Condominas, Jean Lacouture, David Chandler and Hiram Woodward, and rank among his former students.

The book is organised around five parts including a long biographical introduction written by David Chandler. The other four parts plot the various stages of his career. The first part, Autour de l'homme, provides snapshots of Mus at different stages of his life. It includes contributions from Georges Condominas (interviewed by Yves Goudineau), Jean Lacouture, Frances Fitzgerald, David Chandler and Hiram Woodward. The second part, L'Asie vue par Mus, delves into the EFEO years, when he wrote one of his masterpieces Barabudur – first published in parts in the Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient in 1933 and 1934. J. Dumarçay, A. Thompson, P.-Y. Manguin, I. Mabbett, Y. Goudineau and R. Madinier all examine various aspects of his vision of Asia from within (Mus lived in Vietnam during his youth and again after his marriage) — from sacred architecture to the genealogy of forms in the monsoon Asia region, through Indian and indigenous cults in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, Madinier presents a few notes about the ‘Mussian vision of Southeast Asia’, based on an unfinished book project that Mus undertook in the last part of his career (pp. 143–8).

The third and fourth parts examine Mus's journey through the turbulence and vagaries of war, decolonisation, as well as the birth of an independent Vietnam. First, Nguyen Phuong Ngoc, Trinh Van Thao, S. Bayly and A. Larcher-Goscha discuss how Mus understood colonialism and orientalism, through his dialogue with the Vietnamese researchers from the EFEO as well as through his actions as an officer and diplomat during the Second World War and the beginning of the Vietnamese revolution. Then, D. Hémery, D. Varga, S. Rousseau and C. Goscha develop the final years of Mus's life during the period of decolonisation. Some photographs, a bibliography and detailed chronology complete the journey through the life and work of Paul Mus. The end of the book includes five appendices with examples of Mus's work and thought that illustrate just how advanced he was as compared with his compatriots — many of whom failed to understand how fundamentally the Second World War had changed circumstances in Vietnam. His 10-page memorandum on the Franco–Indochinese moral crisis (1 August 1945) shows his precocious grasp of the roots and the very nature of Vietnamese nationalism. How unfortunate it is that those in power at the time and who also ‘received’ these notes did not have wisdom to act on them when hostilities could have still been avoided.

Taken as a whole, this book reveals far more than what is known of Paul Mus's erudition and political commitment across his career. In all aspects of his life, both in his academic as well as politically active careers, he was always placing things, events and processes into larger perspectives. More challenging intellectually, this approach allowed him to give rigorous and far more nuanced portraits of what he studied or witnessed, be they Cham temples, Buddhist iconography, or events such as the Japanese takeover of Indochina in March 1945. Also, in the second part of his academic career, in both his academic and public interventions (for example in newspapers), Paul Mus retained unabatedly a multidisciplinary approach, at a time when discipline-focused work was the norm. Finally, authors in this book also recount many examples of how he tried to ‘humanise the war’ such as in his book Guerre sans visage, 1961, written after the death of his son in the Algerian war. In Paul Mus's mind, considering the enemy as humans, not as wild ducks to shoot at, was a prerequisite for peace talks.

Reading this collection of texts featuring uneven lengths and styles, one could be annoyed by some of the repetitive statements found. These can be deemed necessary, however, given that the ostensible objective of this collection is to cast a wide net so as to give as broad an insight as possible into the work and life of this true humanist who was Paul Mus.