Haile Selassie, Western Education and Political Revolution in Ethiopia, Paulos Milkias, Youngstown NY: Cambria Press, 2006, pp. xxii, 364.

Paulos Milkias explores Ethiopia's 1974 revolution, focusing on the role of ideas in driving political change. The core of the book explains the political forces that led to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie I, ending Ethiopia's 3,000-year-old hereditary feudal order and the installation of a military government led by a committee known as the Derg (or Dergue), headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam. The final sections of the book cover the complex and bloody consolidation of the Derg's rule and that government's demise seventeen years later, overthrown by a coalition of revolutionary movements seeking autonomy from Ethiopia's centralized, authoritarian government.