Michael Newton is a very prolific writer. The blurb on the back of this book says that he has published 277 other books. Most are fiction, some are not. Among the nonfiction titles there are works on cryptozoology (the study of “hidden” animals: Bigfoot and the like), serial killers, the FBI and weaponry. Newton has also published several books on the Ku Klux Klan, including an encyclopedia; a history of the Klan in Birmingham, Alabama; a history of the Klan and the FBI; and an award-winning history of the Klan in Florida. This impressive list of publications is perhaps revealing about both the nature and the style of this book.

With such a long list of works to his credit, it is apparent that Newton is not the academic who ruminates lengthily on his subjects. This book is not a subtle dissection of Klan motives or a historiographical analysis of an American institution. That is not to condemn the work. It is a narrative history of a long-lived hate group and as such makes a good successor to Wyn Craig Wade's 1987 Fiery Cross and his own The Ku Klux Klan: A Comprehensive Guide (2006). It brings Wade's superb text up to 2014 – something which has been required for some time – and it puts much of the information in his 2006 work into a more digestible format.

Perhaps the main achievement of this book is that it represents a welcome break from the regional and single-period studies the like of which seem to have dominated Klan scholarship recently. It is limited neither to a particular area, as with Michael Brooks's The Ku Klux Klan in Wood County, Ohio (2014), nor to a particular period, as with David Cunningham's Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan (2013). Instead, it represents a good example of clearly defined, broad-brush, synthetic history – a type of history which certainly has a place in understanding complex organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

That said, the prose is workmanlike and at times rather breathless and dense with the facts it is constantly getting across. This is rather a shame, as a more punchy style would enable the mass of information it contains to reach a far larger audience. But perhaps this was not a consideration. The book is sized as a textbook, in a seven-inch-by-ten format, and contains many photographs – which are generally extremely well chosen and original – both features that perhaps illustrate the readership at which it is aimed.

As a Klan reference and text this book is superb. It is laden with statistics – most fully cited and attributed in scholarly fashion. For instance, in 1869, according to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan had 550,000 members (14). According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, by 2013 the twenty-six Klans operating in the US had between five and eight thousand members (261). However, those looking to answer specific detailed questions of interpretation may be less satisfied. For example, there is one brief paragraph on the highly contested numbers of the 1920s Klan – which he puts at a peak of about 4–5 million (49).

Overall, this analysis of the numbers is typical of the book. It is well informed, but it is not going to move the debates associated with the Klan much further forward. In spite of Newton's impressive breadth of research, it would appear that there is still a gap in the market for a new work on the entire history of the Klan. What is needed is a text which can combine Newton's narrative strengths with, at the same time, the more subtle and analytical work being carried out by such current scholars as Craig Fox, Miguel Hernandez and Elaine Frantz Parsons. It appears that this book is not the place to look for new ideas, but it is the place to check that you fully understand the existing state of play in popular Klan studies.