MixedNew StatesmanLovell’s book contributes to a fuller picture of the Cold War, too often depicted simply as a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union ... as Lovell shows, China enthusiastically joined the United States, the USSR, Cuba and some east European states in the geopolitical competition of the era ... Yet while Lovell challenges some aspects of conventional wisdom, she risks inadvertently reinforcing others – in particular, the assumption that Maoism was a coherent movement, single-mindedly committed to violent revolution, directed by foreign powers manipulating a motley crew of fanatics ... Lovell certainly discusses the diversity of Maoism, but her book sometimes implies it was more coherent than it really was, while overemphasising the roles of Beijing and Mao himself. And although Lovell does examine the social contexts in which Maoism emerged, these are rarely in the foreground, so readers do not always get a real sense of why the ideology’s highly diverse forms appealed at particular times and in very different societies.
Yuri Slezkine
RaveThe Financial Times...[a] brilliant and suitably monumental book ... Vivid, engaging and omnivorous in its deployment of anthropological and sociological ideas, The House of Government has a Tolstoyan cast of characters ... as we struggle to balance the benefits of industrial modernity with its huge costs — both human and environmental — Slezkine’s gripping history of these latter-day Fausts is especially relevant, even if their mental world seems so remote from our own.
