On Strange Rebels

I was super excited about this work, but in the end, I was a bit disappointed. Caryl does a fair job of discussing each of these five major stories: the coming of Margaret Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the Iranian Revolution, the coup in Afghanistan and the Soviet War in Afghanistan, and the rise of Pope John Paul II. That being said, these stories mostly function as discrete phenomena. There is some overlap between any two of them, but Caryl ultimately fails to articulate some sort of broad “counterrevolution.” I think the idea of counterrevolution is a fair schematic to think about these events, but more time should have been spent drawing together their similarities and developing a truly comparative piece of historiography.