The Revolutionists

Burke, a longtime foreign correspondent, braids together the era's leftist militants and Islamist extremists, from West German and Italian cells to Middle Eastern factions, into one continuous story of the late 1960s through early 1980s rather than treating them as separate phenomena. The book's strength is refusing both hagiography and caricature: these are people convinced that enough violence could bend history overnight, then confronted with how slow-moving and absorbent modern states actually are. Its geographic focus stops short of Latin America and Northern Ireland, which narrows the claim to 'hijacking the 1970s' somewhat, but within that frame the anecdote-driven reporting gives the ideological abstractions an unusual amount of lived texture.