Impeccably researched ... Informative ... Ball has written an exceptionally erudite and detailed history of assassination, packed with research drawn from government archives across the world.
This is a big subject and Ball does well to cover as much as he does. But there should be more to come, especially a detailed analysis of the political and moral effectiveness of assassination as a tactic or strategy.
Ball’s book suffers from being too broad and too shallow. He treats assassination as any murder for a political purpose, which is reasonable enough in theory but gives him a vast number of incidents to examine ... His analysis is light ... A deeper exploration of case studies would have brought us closer to understanding why assassinations became so common in some places and not others ... The book comes closest to this in its discussion of assassination policies by democracies.
Reads like an anti-thriller—this despite its international ambit and the corpses of prominent statesmen strewn higgledy-piggledy across its pages ... In Ball’s telling, the heroic and the despotic run together into a generic sequence of procuration, murder, and cover-up, replayed at such dizzying speed that one can only succumb to whiplash ... Ball draws frustratingly scant conclusions ... In its breadth and aloofness, Death to Order feels like a distant cousin of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y ... Both have the woozy, maddening force of a carousel stuck in overdrive.
Exhaustive ... Much of Death To Order reads like a Frederick Forsyth fiction ... Thorough and gripping ... [Ball] is particularly acute on the political machinations behind the scenes.
