Category: Book Reviews

Francis Fukuyama Liberalism and its Discontents Profile Books Ltd. London, 2022, ISBN: 978-1-80081-008-2, 145 pp., $17 US The wisdom of classic liberalism is in jeopardy, and the fissures in the faith of its ideologues are now manifest.  The liberal doctrine, in its current form, has not only failed to address the socio-economic problems, but its radical emphasis on individualization has ended up aggravating their severity. Francis Fukuyama in his book […]

Sharifullah Dorani The Lone Leopard S&M Publishing House, July 2022, ISBN: 978-1-7396069-0-9, 436 pp., £19.99 ̸ £10.99, hb. In The Lone Leopard – a well-researched, historical fiction that took Dr Sharifullah Dorani “12 years” (Dorani, 2022: 430) to write – we follow Ahmad, a deeply religious young man, through school in Kabul, then as the Russians leave and the Mujahideen take over the family go to Moscow. After a time in Moscow, […]

Adam Goodman The Deportation Machine. America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780691182155, 323 pp., $29.95 / £25.00) The Deportation Machine is an analysis and discussion of the deportation regime developed in the United States of America (USA) in the nineteenth century. As Goodman explains, the book “reveals how public officials have assembled well-oiled deportation machines, propelled by bureaucratic self-interest as well as the concerns […]

Rachel McCleary and Robert J Barro The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, ISBN: 9780691217109, 216 pp., $21.95 / £18.99) The Wealth of Religions is a comprehensive effort to analyze how religion matters in social sciences, specifically economics. The book focuses on the relation between religion and political economy by treating this relation as a two-way interaction, how religion affects economic growth, […]

Joseph Masco The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780691202174, pp. 456, Price: $27.95 / £22.00) The nuclear weapons programme is one of our time’s most talked about yet misunderstood technological endeavours. While historians have studied the early years of the Manhattan project in-depth, the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons has ensured that the nature of the technology decision-making and work […]

John G. Matsusaka Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780691199726, 312 pp., $29.95 / £25.00) Matsusaka sets out on a very ambitious task – he seeks to find a political corrective to the crisis of democratic representation that is currently plaguing the United States (and many other countries), culminating in the rise to power of populist figures. Broadly […]

Catherine E. De Vries and Sara B. Hobolt Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780691194752, 336 pp., $32.00 / £25.00) According to academics, after a decade of crisis, European politics have suffered unfathomable metamorphoses, performing in the collapse of formerly-stable Western European political institutions. It’s egregious that no one can entirely predict how this would affect European politics, but the reality […]

Noah Feldman The Arab Winter: A Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780691194929, 216 pp., $22.95 hb.) After the fall of Tunisia and the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the so-called “Arab Spring” reached Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria. The regimes of Ben Ali, Gaddafi, and the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Ali Abdullah Saleh fell, while the Syrian revolution turned into a multilateral war. At […]

Adam Mestyan Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. ISNB:9780691172644, pp.368, $45.00, paperback.) The book, Arab Patriotism, written by Adam Mestyan reflects on what the Ottoman context of Egypt means for its nationalism.  Throughout the nineteenth century the governance of the Egyptian province was in the hands of one Turkish-speaking family. They were neither local Egyptians nor people sent from […]