Revolution with Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992, by James Krapfl. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2013. xxi, 260 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). is strange thing, muses James Krapfl, that studies of the Czechoslovak revolution of 1989 ignore or marginalize its most important actor: Czechoslovak citizens. If the 1989 revolution was indeed revolution, along the lines of the French Revolution, it follows that the demos--the people--should be at the centre of our attention (p. 1). Krapfl's Revolution with Human Face: Politics, Culture and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992, originally published in 2009 as Revolucia s ludskou tvarou but now made available in English for the first time, corrects this central flaw. Inspired by Lynn Hunt's study of politics, culture, and class in the French revolution and steeped in Charles Tilly's theory of revolution, Revolution with Human Face seeks to get under the skin of ordinary citizens who--first in their thousands, then in their millions--created the collective effervescence that fizzed across Czechoslovakia in November and December 1989 in the form of demonstrations, symbolic strikes, happenings, pilgrimages, festivals, and gestures of support. It was during these two months, when people power held sway in streets and squares throughout Czechoslovakia, that the revolutionary ideals of November were formulated and the Communist old regime forced, without violence, to give way to new, democratic order. The atmosphere was something those who experienced it would never forget. This was the Gentle, Joyful, Merry, or Velvet revolution that inspired so many Czechoslovak citizens in late 1989 but was later claimed by many Czechs and Slovaks to have been stolen from idealists or corrupted by professional politicians. Sweeping aside the notions that 1989 in Central Europe did not constitute real revolution or merely involved the importation of Western models of democracy, Krapfl argues that new, revolutionary culture, akin to a new religion, came into being in Czechoslovakia on November 17, 1989, the day that youthful demonstrators were beaten by Prague riot police. The widespread outrage caused by the Communist regime's overreaction to peaceful demonstration rapidly created the national sense of revolutionary community, one with distinct hopes, aims and ideals as expressed in hundreds of bulletins, thousands of flyers, and tens of thousands of proclamations, declarations, and manifestos--the main sources for this minutely-researched study. At the heart of Krapfl's analysis is the notion that the revolutionary crowds held certain ideals, aims, and methods as sacred. Among the most cherished were nonviolence, self-organization, and spontaneity. The revolutionaries' stated goals were freedom, fairness and, above all, humanity, humaneness or humanness (lidskost, ludskos't). The Czechoslovak revolution, Krapfl argues, was different from the French Revolution, and perhaps all other European revolutions, in raising humanity above ideology. …