By simultaneously analysing unfolding events in Addis Ababa and Maale, and juxtaposing this with brief contrasting and confirming events and processes of the classic revolutions of France, Russia and China, Donham paints a fascinating picture of a peripheral people's experience of revolution and situates it within a national and global context...a very readable and sometimes even amusing book. -

• Orientations - on jazz, modernity and ethnographic history; introduction - genealogies of the modern and the anti-modern; the metanarrative of modernity in Ethiopia - 1975; revolution within a revolution - divine kings and "zemecha" students in Maale; revolution as a return to tradition in Maale; the dialectic of modernity in a North American Christian mission; the cultural construction of conversion in Maale; Marxist modernism at the Ethiopian centre - cold war deterritorializations; the revolutionary state at the grass roots - modernist institutions in Maale during the 1980s; afterword/afterward.