jpowerj's reviews
368 reviews

I... this one is hard to review, lol. Because, I respect and admire Horne's contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle throughout his life! I just... this book kind of reads like a stream-of-consciousness memoir sometimes, with nuggets of insight that are important to organizers today (for understanding the non-whitewashed history of this struggle), but yeah just, the ~900 pages were a bit much imo

Honestly like... REQUIRED reading for anyone who is scared about how political activities are monitored by the FBI. I like this one specifically, though, because I feel like it avoids the kinds of paranoid speculations/unjustified inferences that make most other books like this unreadable to me! For example, I was reading it at the same time as "The Iran-Contra Connection" by the same publisher, which imo is more just like a mishmash of "this person was in this group with this person", whereas the Gelbspan book he actually goes and interviews people to figure out (what annoying social science people like me) call the *mechanism* of how the linkages actually operated -- who had control over what decisions?

Some parts were a bit overly-detailed maybe, but way less so than the Ben Kiernan books on Kampuchea, and with way more of a point than the Dresch book about Yemen. Strong recommend tbh

It starts off real strong, and I wish I'd known about it when I was teaching the public policy class... But then in the second half it kinda unravels into "here's a bunch of disjointed opinions on why third world countries are so fucked up, we don't have enough space for me to elaborate"

Super super fascinating, and honestly pairs perfectly with the Crampton book on Bulgaria :3