RaveThe Guardian (UK)Even rarer than this is a book whose significance is enhanced by unpredictable events. But this is unquestionably the case with Gideon Rachman’s latest work, The Age of the Strongman, which goes some distance in explaining the bigger picture behind all this. Rachman is chief foreign policy commentator at the Financial Times. As such, not only has he studied many of the strongmen in this book, he knows most of them as well. This is one of the main reasons why the book hasn’t lost any relevance despite being finished before the Russian invasion ... provides a useful list of characteristics that strongmen share whether democratically elected or not ... To begin working out what we do about this, you could do worse than by reading this pithy and forceful book.
Lea Ypi
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... offers gem after gem of the bizarre reality that Hoxhaism produced ... Detailing the absurdities of Hoxha’s regime from a child’s perspective, Ypi pulls off the remarkable feat of emphasizing their cruelty with a light and often humorous touch ... Her criticism is almost always implicit but devastating nonetheless.
Sarah Chayes
RaveBook PostOn Corruption in America , draws a clear line from the brutal practices associated with robber-baron cartels in the late nineteenth century to today’s corporate and financial institutions, which benefit from a scale offered by globalization that was hitherto undreamt of ... For Chayes, American corruption has its roots the practices of American capitalism. Her argument is complex and involves long excursions into early stages of human evolution, ancient Greece, the Bible, the Belle Époque, and the war in Afghanistan, touching on countless bits of exotica from history and far-flung places ... The introduction of complex social networks—eventually in the form of class, but above all, money—in her view distorted the evolution of sharing and encouraged self-promotion and greed ... The driving force behind corruption’s advance, then, in Chayes’s telling, is not capitalism per se (since she argues there was a benign post-war version of it), but a failure to contain the influence of money on policy and law enforcement, and the mirror influence back on the economic system to grow wealth and further shape political outcomes.
Kapka Kassabova
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Experienced readers of Kapka Kassabova’s non-fiction know not to become too emotionally involved when she introduces you to a new character, in the same way as committed viewers of Casualty’s Christmas special have learnt to avoid doing so. In neither case do stories tend to end well. Indeed, if Kassabova were to filter out the dark from her writing, there would be little to discuss, except perhaps her great gift for describing nature. Nonetheless, you can’t help feeling as she persuades ordinary people to tell their extraordinary stories that she sets her radar to pick up anything that sounds remotely bleak or sinister ... All Kassabova’s non-fiction is intensely personal, but her new book particularly so ... As in all her stories, Kassabova strikes the perfect balance in exposing how the wheel of history, especially unforgiving in the Balkans, crushes great human potential but is not always able to extinguish it.
Peter Pomerantsev
PositiveThe Times (UK)Like many dealing with these profoundly difficult issues, Pomerantsev is short on answers. But he has posed the questions forcefully using well-reported case studies backed up by academic research.
