Reviews – Andrew S. Tompkins

Rezension: Peters, Von Solidarność zur Schocktherapie

11/12/2024

Monographie rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult (11.12.2024.) Fazit: Florian Peters hat eine nuancierte Erzählung des polnischen Wegs in den Kapitalismus geschrieben. Dabei analysiert er Thesenpapiere, Partei- und Gewerkschaftsprogramme sowie graue Literatur, Memoiren, Umfragen, Presse und auch Gedichte. Er zeigt hervorragende Kenntnisse der relevanten (meist polnischsprachigen) Literatur und liefert eine überzeugende, klar argumentierte, gut lesbare Ideen- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte…
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Rezension: Gerst et al., Grenzforschung

18/11/2021

Sammelband rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult (18.11.2021). Veröffentlicht auch bei Soziopolis unter dem Titel “Erkundungen im Grenzgebiet”. Zusammenfassung: Die Beiträge eignen sich am besten zur eigenständigen Lektüre der einzelnen Themen, die allerdings klar mit übergeordneten Fragen verbunden sind. Entsprechend dem Ansatz der Herausgeber:innen, die Bandbreite der Grenzforschung vor allem in theoretischer und methodischer Hinsicht darzustellen, überwiegen insgesamt…
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Review: Augustine, Taking on Technocracy

01/02/2021

Monograph reviewed for German Studies Review 44 (1), 2021 (pp. 208-210). Summary: Taking on Technocracy covers a broad range of developments in the domains of technology, policy, and protest, analyzing them with nuance in the different contexts of East and West Germany. For those wanting to understand why the issue of nuclear power has remained…
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Review: Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain

26/01/2021

Monograph reviewed for German History in Volume 39, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 330–332. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghab008 Summary: West Germany and the Iron Curtain is an ambitious re-examination of German history from its literal margins. Eckert’s methodologically innovative analysis not only straddles the East-West divide but interrogates 1945 and 1989/90 as chronological caesuras. Refracted through the environmental…
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Review: Milder, Greening Democracy

05/08/2020

Monograph reviewed for H-German (August 2020). Summary: Throughout Greening Democracy, Milder stresses that antinuclear activism was about more than the Greens and that it did more than just bring ’68ers into the fold of liberal, parliamentary democracy. These are welcome arguments, and Milder misses no opportunity to show how people of different generations and with…
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Binding the Nation, Bounding the State: Germany and its Borders

04/01/2019

Review article for German History Vol. 37, No. 1 (2019), examining seventeen recent publications on the borders of Germany and of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Review: Smith, Terror and Terroir

29/09/2018

Monograph reviewed for French History, Volume 32, Issue 4, December 2018, pp. 615–617. doi:10.1093/fh/cry078 Summary: In the summer of 1907, France’s Midi rouge (the ‘red South’) was in revolt, with regular Sunday protests in towns throughout the region drawing as many as 600,000 participants. After protesters torched buildings in Narbonne, the military occupied the town,…
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Review: Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders

19/12/2017

Monograph reviewed for Social History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2018), pp. 156-158. doi:10.1080/03071022.2017.1397367 Summary: Davey convincingly argues that tiers-mondisme and sans-frontiérisme were never so far apart as their advocates subsequently claimed, showing that they always shared key points of reference (the post-colonial third world, the Second World War) and even key practices (e.g. ‘speaking out’,…
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Review: Naples and Bickham Mendez, Border Politics

04/04/2017

Volume reviewed for the Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2017), pp. 474-476. doi:10.1177/0022009416688182 Summary: This interdisciplinary volume weds social movement studies, which remains largely embedded in the social sciences, with border studies, a growing field with roots in geography, anthropology and women’s studies. The editors take an intersectional approach, looking at how…
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Review: Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties

01/09/2014

Monograph reviewed for German History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2014), pp. 507-509. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghu024 Summary: Brown offers an incisive critique of many supposedly ‘transnational’ studies published in the last decade, focused as they are on the accumulation of national case studies. His own ‘transnational’ tells us far more about how Germans drew on ‘the global’ than…
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Category: Reviews