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 Liberalism and its Discontents has underscored the need to undo the wrongs committed by or associated with classic liberalism and to reestablish the faith in liberalism’s ability to build an […]

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, they pay people traffickers to get them to the UK. Ahmad later returns to Afghanistan to seek a wife. We are taken through the horrors of war and the tribal […]

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 of local communities and private firms. It is a book about how authorities have used the machine’s three expulsion mechanisms – formal deportation, voluntary departure, and self-deportation to exert tremendous […]

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, and how economic outcomes affect religiousness. The book is a thought-provoking piece on how to think about religion in social sciences.   The book is organized into two sections. The book’s […]

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 methods involved in the modern US nuclear weapons programme (from the 1960s to the present) has remained unclear. Fortunately, a few gutsy ethnographers have made the effort to investigate nuclear […]

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 speaking, his antidote to the current lack of confidence in national political institutions is to transfer power and voice back to the citizenry. In short, the solution to poor democracy […]

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 of developing new political players cannot be overlooked. Their entrance into the political arena has piqued the curiosity of scholars, who have been fascinated by attempts to interpret the reasons […]

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 the same time, the name of the Arab spring raises controversy due to the violence that accompanied the revolutions and their disappointing results. In “The Arab Winter,” Noam Feldman emphasized […]

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 the imperial elite. Mestyan noted that, Patriotism or national pride is the feeling of love, devotion, and sense of attachment to a homeland or the country and alliance with other […]