Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist * The Observer * It will not open doors at the White House because it makes for uncomfortable reading ... a wide-ranging and powerfully argued critique, that gives pause for thought * (in praise of The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad), Financial Times * Tariq Ali has not lost the passion and vim which made him a symbol of the spirit of '68 ... has not seen fit to join forces with the terminally cynical, or set up a graven god that can be accused of failing ... Ali has spent much of his life documenting America as the arsenal of counter-revolution. * Christopher Hitchens (in praise of Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties), Observer * For years, left-wing critics have framed the debate. Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Marc Mauer and, more recently, Michelle Alexander gave us the terminology to speak about all this: the prison industrial complex, abolition, non-reform reform and The New Jim Crow.. [Ali's theorized term "extreme center"] provides us with a new language to describe our problems.[O]ne of the key tasks of the extreme center is to take center stage, to ensure that no alternative seems either reasonable or possible. * James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of our Era, CounterPunch *