RaveThe Irish Times\"...superb ... When the Clock Broke offers a compelling examination of a neglected and revealing period in American history. It is also one of the most entertaining history books I have read in years. Ganz has a novelist’s skill at managing character, pacing and plot, as well as a great eye for details that are telling, bizarre and hilarious ... Ganz brilliantly weaves the structural changes in American politics and society into his portraits of the right-wing figures who rose to prominence in this period.\
Adam Shatz
RaveThe Irish Times\"...a superb example of historical biography ... For Shatz, Fanon must be criticised as well as admired. And his writings must be contextualised within the different historical epoch in which he lived. But Fanon is still relevant because \'the racial divisions and economic inequalities that he protested were not so much liquidated as reconfigured.\' It is no wonder, then, that Fanon is an icon for many anti-racist activists today. Fanon speaks to us because he sought to create a new world free of the domination of the old.\
Jonathan Eig
PositiveIrish Times (IRE)Eig’s compulsively readable new biography could hardly be more timely. Though it does not contain many new revelations, the book is the most accessible and balanced biography of this great man ... Strong on narrative but light on analysis. It reflects the strengths of its author, a professional biographer but not a trained historian. It is a pleasure to read. Eig writes with a great economy of style. He has an eye for the telling detail and for setting the scene. He effectively employs novelistic techniques such as shifts in perspective. His account benefits from frequent direct quotations ... Despite his exhaustive research, we learn little that we didn’t know already. King’s story has been told so many times that it is hard to say anything new. We didn’t need a new book to remind us of how significant a figure he was or that he was a flawed and complicated man.
Barbara F. Walter
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)The central contention is that civil wars are most likely to occur in countries that exist in a \'middle ground\' between democracy and autocracy known as \'anocracy\'. Here she relies on the widely used Polity Score ... The Polity Score offers false objectivity. The numbers appears to provide quantitative accuracy but they are necessarily derived from a host of subjective assumptions ... The general laws that Walter claims to have discovered also fail to capture the complex histories of specific conflicts ... Walter assumes that civil wars originate in endogamous factors when in fact they often result from exogamous ones ... The biggest weakness in Walter’s analysis is her failure to provide a clear definition of \'civil war\' ... Walter is perhaps too ready to indulge the fantasies of white nationalists reared on the apocalyptic Turner Diaries ... Even if that scenario remains thankfully far-fetched, Walter is certainly right to be alarmed. The sheer quantity of guns in circulation means the US is likely to see yet more political violence. And, to her credit, she places the increasingly anti-democratic features of American politics into a global perspective that is all too rare.
