Viva la Revolución - Eric Hobsbawm

 Inevitably it changed my perspective on the history of the rest of the globe, if only by dissolving the border between the 'developed' and the 'Third' worlds, the present and the historic past. (...) It forced one to make sense of what was at first sight implausible. It provided what 'counterfactual' speculations can never do, namely a genuine range of alternative outcomes to historical situations: right-wing chieftains who become the inspiration of labour movements (Argentina, Brazil), fascist ideologists who join with a left-wing miners' union to make a revolution that gives the land to the peasants (Bolivia), the only state in the world that has actually abolished its army (Costa Rica), a single-party state of notorious corruption whose Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) recruits its personnel systematically from the most revolutionary among its university students (Mexico), a region where first-generation immigrants from the Third World can become presidents and Arabs ('Turcos') tend to be more successful than Jews.