Klooster's comparative account of the American, French, Haitian and Spanish American revolutions is, Geggus notes, the first to hold all four in a single frame, since Godechot, Palmer, Liss and Langley each left one out. Under two hundred pages give a chapter to each and draw out shared patterns: war and international conflict as cause, contingency in outcome, civil war erupting where aggrieved subalterns met revolutionary elites, and democracy marginal as either aim or result. That places the book nearer Godechot than Palmer, with fiscal strain and threatened privilege counting for more than libertarian ideas. Geggus finds the Spanish American chapter the strongest and the Haitian one the weakest, listing errors about colonial councils, Christophe's land grants and the authorship of the rural code, and faulting the omission of war's role in Haitian abolition and independence. He still recommends it as a teaching text with an exceptional multilingual bibliography.