... lively and ambitious ... I was so rapt by “Against the World” that it was only when sitting down to write about it that I realized how resistant it is to a neat summary, because there isn’t a single story Zahra tells ... Every story in this book is relevant and absorbing; Zahra plaits her narrative strands together with such deliberation and skill that nothing is out of place ... She doesn’t rely on the syntheses of other scholars, examining instead how people understood events as they unfolded in real time. Her searching book reminds us that a view from 10,000 feet doesn’t always capture what’s actually happening on the ground.
Ms. Zahra’s narrative shows us how closely—even eerily—our present-day world resembles the state of the globe roughly a century ago ... The most engaging sections of Ms. Zahra’s vigorous and informative book are those in which she offers us biographical portraits of some of the players in the great game of globalization.
Tacit within this illuminating account is a cautionary rebuke of those historians who, prematurely and perhaps aspirationally, announced a world that had moved beyond the nation-state.
... a history that holds relevance for today ... readers will often squirm at Zahra’s excellent yet unnerving history of an era when nationalism—always more powerful than ideology, economics, or brotherly love—exploded ... Discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.
... eye-opening ... Firmly grounded in historical scholarship yet speaking clearly to today’s anxieties over globalization, this expert study has much to offer.
