"The book reconceptualizes power and explores factors that allow it to take on extreme forms. The three case studies are simply superb, each the most profound and most interesting I have seen on each of these examples of power in excess."--Robert B. Edgerton, author of Rules, Exceptions, and Social Order

"One of anthropology's master thinkers offers a sustained, empirically grounded meditation on questions that have concerned him through a long career: how, when, and why absolutizing ideas and organized power converge to cause human suffering. Our thinking about . . . power mongers . . . will never be the same." --Charles Tilly, author of Durable Inequality