Advocates for books that matter.
Thanassis Cambanis
“It is one of the many strengths of Thanassis Cambanis’s fluent, intelligent, and highly informed book, Once Upon a Revolution, that he convincingly explains what happened in Egypt over the last four years. It should be read by anybody perplexed by how Egypt’s apparent entry into a brave new democratic world was ultimately defeated. This account has the vividness and readability of eyewitness reporting combined with an unsentimental and perceptive judgment about where the opponents of autocracy went wrong.” – Patrick Cockburn, The New York Times Book Review
“A comprehensive, straightforward—and sympathetic—accounting of the Egyptian revolution. . . . A cautionary and instructive tale that should be required reading for would-be revolutionaries everywhere, Wall Street Occupiers and Hong Kong umbrella-holders alike, on the extent to which the powerful will go to prevent change and the pitfalls of decentralized revolutionary movements.” – Max Strasser, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Depressingly excellent… Lays out the near-brilliant way in which Hezbollah manages to be both the party of the downtrodden and the puppet of two of the area’s most retrograde dictatorships. Cambanis shows how the trick is pulled.”—Christopher Hitchens, Slate, author of Hitch-22 and God Is Not Great
“An indispensable guide to understanding the region’s most formidable extra-state actor. Cambanis skillfully pinpoints the reasons for Hezbollah’s political success. . . . In prose that is often eloquent yet earthy, indicative of scholarly erudition as well as a storyteller’s flair for capturing the complexities of human psychology, Cambanis describes the seemingly contradictory impulses he discovers.” —The Christian Science Monitor