Taking Power: On the Origins of Third WorldRevolutions. By John Foran. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005. 410p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

John Foran's book draws faithfully from the rich literature onrevolutions from the 1970s and beyond and extends this work inuseful ways. It presents a well-crafted synthetic argument thatfinds a nice balance between international and domestic sources ofrevolution and between structural constraints and political agency.It also examines thoughtfully an extraordinary number of cases in arelatively compact form. The author develops his argument using thetools of Boolean algebra to explain 10 cases of revolutionarysuccess and 29 additional cases of reversed revolutions,unsuccessful attempts, political revolutions that did not lead tosocial transformations, and revolutionary movements that neveremerged despite conditions that might have been expected to generatesuch movements.