To say that The Revolution Has Come is long-awaited is rather an understatement. As Spencer notes in her heartfelt introduction, this book has been nearly twenty years in the making. In that time, the Black Panther Party has been the subject of a cascade of books, memoirs, academic articles, documentaries, and conferences. Whereas most accounts focus on the BPP's relatively brief period of notoriety in the late 1960s, Spencer's narrative encompasses the 1970s, a period that remains controversial, largely as a consequence of Hugh Pearson's damning account of Huey P. Newton's many failings. Drawing on the journalism of David Horowitz and Kate Coleman, Pearson encouraged readers to consider the BPP as a quasi-criminal organization, riddled with abusive personalities, drugs, and violence. Spencer offers an important corrective, highlighting the other activities of the BPP while not shying away from the deleterious impact of Newton's leadership.

Spencer seeks to train a local-history lens on the party's operation in Oakland, its place of foundation and later base of operations, while paying particular attention to the role that gender played in the party's operation and development. Her major contribution to BPP studies largely comes through her extensive mining of the Huey P. Newton collection at Stanford University and a sequence of oral histories she conducted in the early years of her research. These interviews uncover some fascinating perspectives on the BPP, from Bobby Seale's horror at Newton's drug dealing to observations on the loneliness that many Panthers experienced as a consequence of the total devotion demanded by the party. As suggested by the prevalence of oral-history testimony, Spencer is strongest in highlighting the personal experience of life in the party, from the transformative impact of joining to the pressure of the daily demands members experienced, and the internal dynamics that led many members to depart. This facet of the BPP's history is particularly apparent in the sad tale of Connie Matthews, who became embroiled in the BPP's 1970–71 schism, and, according to Spencer, became the unwitting lynchpin of the FBI's prolonged campaign against the BPP.

Like a number of other BPP social historians, Spencer prioritizes BPP sources and tends to be reluctant to negotiate between friendly and critical sources, instead offering a chronicle that is skewed towards what might be considered the BPP's official history. For example, there is very little analysis of the press response to the party, particularly from the unfriendly Oakland Tribune, and Spencer ignores many of the underground activities that brought the BPP into disrepute during the 1970s. As this suggests, there is a whiff of archive fever about The Revolution Has Come. More problematic is Spencer's reluctance to use gender as an analytical tool. As numerous historians have demonstrated, gender is a powerful prism through which to analyze the BPP. Yet Spencer treats gender rather too cursorily, deemphasizing the corrosive impact of masculinism on the BPP and drawing the rather banal conclusion that women organized behind the scenes while the men drew the attention from both the media and the authorities.

Such inattention to theory is a problem that bedevils BPP social histories such as The Revolution Has Come. The most impressive recent works on the BPP have been characterized by their authors’ willingness to use different interpretive tools to analyze the party, such as Donna Murch's focus on migration, Jane Rhodes's media analysis, or Robert Self's use of urbanism and suburbanization. Spencer, by contrast, places the BPP in a social-activist context, suggesting that it be seen as another part of the civil rights movement. In doing so, she misrepresents many of its most important features, most notably its intellectual life. She misreads the BPP's engagement with Fanon, following the tired line that the BPP only took influence from Fanon's interpretation of violence – or rather, from Sartre's terrible misinterpretation of Fanon.

Notably, there is no discussion of Fanon's views on revolutionary culture, or indeed of the lumpenproletariat. The profound influence of Robert F. Williams on Huey P. Newton is ignored, as are Ernesto “Che” Guevara's writings on guerilla warfare. While Spencer acknowledges the importance of political education to the quotidian life of the party, without a full understanding of the many influences that acted on the BPP she cannot fully explain the intellectual life of its members. This might appear to be a minor point, but it is in fact crucial. One of the major criticisms leveled at the BPP is that it had little impact on the world around it. As Spencer suggests throughout, this is easily rebutted by noting the transformative impact that membership had on those who took part in party life. In encouraging Panthers to place their lives, experience, and ideas within broader intellectual – and particularly Marxist – trends, the BPP positioned its members within the wider anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles of the postwar period. While daily life in the party, as Spencer suggests, tended towards mundane activities such as selling newspapers, knocking on doors, fund-raising, and the occasional protest, political education opened a world of possibility for BPP members, one that we overlook at our peril.