People versus power: This is how most of us remember Egypt’s 2011-13 upheavals. Crowds fight the police under clouds of tear gas on a Nile bridge, bringing down the dictator Hosni Mubarak. Later, they rise to challenge his replacement, the Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi, but are ultimately betrayed and crushed by a revived military regime ... David D. Kirkpatrick’s engrossing account of his time as the New York Times Cairo bureau chief covering the Egyptian revolution...he brings two new contributions to his retelling. One is The Times’s extraordinary access to decision makers. Kirkpatrick gives an unmatched blow-by-blow of the Obama administration’s Egypt diplomacy, with the Americans’ mixed signals undercutting its impact. Of greater general interest in understanding the final outcome are Kirkpatrick’s extensive interviews with Egyptian officials and with Morsi’s aides. Kirkpatrick’s other key contribution is his willingness to plunge into the messy, sprawling street violence, and show how each side could perceive itself a victim and step up its own provocative tactics in response ... Into the Hands of the Soldiers is a journalist’s eye view, but not a comprehensive history.

Successful uprisings tend to have two parties—the state and the people. Egypt, to its great misfortune, had at least four: the state, the liberal opposition, the Islamists and powerful outsiders, above all the U.S. and the Persian Gulf countries. Each seems to have taken a turn slamming the doors shut just as the light of democracy began to shine through. It’s no secret that Egypt’s permanent state apparatus—its army, police, intelligence service and judiciary—never accepted the legitimacy of the popular movement and actively undermined Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood official who in 2012 won Egypt’s first free presidential election. What Mr. Kirkpatrick captures is the utter contempt among these powerful actors for the idea of popular sovereignty.

In December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze. His death sparked a conflagration that raged from North Africa to the Levant and all the way to the Gulf. On 11 February 2011, mass demonstrations and the collapse of US support forced Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president, out of office. After nearly 30 years, a pharaoh had fallen ... David Kirkpatrick's book, Into the Hands of the Soldiers, gives a first-hand account of the failure of democracy to take root in Egypt and the region. Kirkpatrick meticulously chronicles Mubarak’s downfall and the coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi ... Kirkpatrick grapples thoughtfully with events he witnessed. At one point he writes: 'We set ourselves up for disappointment … Who stole the revolution? That image of the revolution was as much about western narcissism as it was about Egypt.'

...it was in 2011, when Egypt shook off one near dictatorship and replaced it with another only to have a military coup replace that strongman and further crack down on dissent. Such victory as there is to declare is hard to discern. Egypt is poor, overpopulated, and riddled with a corrupt bureaucracy, but apart from that, Kirkpatrick writes, it defies the usual characterizations. Israel and Egypt have cooperated, against all expectation, in fighting the Islamic State group; Egyptian women are perhaps more politically engaged than American women; Islamists willing to commit terror are in it for more than the promise of a harem in the afterlife; and so on. Pushing away layers of myth, the author depicts a complex, straining-to-be-modern society that is hampered by autocracy and has long been so ... A valuable portrait of a society moving toward fulfilling 'the promises of freedom and democracy' of the Arab Spring—but with a way to go still.

When New York Times correspondent Kirkpatrick arrived in Egypt in late 2010, it seemed like an easy, almost idyllic assignment of studying Arabic and attending dinner parties; 'the experts in Washington had all assured me that nothing else interesting would happen.' It was not to be, and the resulting story is as much about the cluelessness of those so-called experts as about the Egyptians whose improbable revolution was overtaken by violence, sectarianism, and venality ... Though Kirkpatrick lacks the insight into Egyptian political life that many local writers have brought to this subject, this dark chronicle adeptly weaves his personal experiences of the tumult with criticism of the flatfooted American response.