This is a complex book. A quotation at the start of the book, loosely translated, is: tyranny and uprisings go together like a lid and a pot. This sums up a major theme of the book. The "time breaks" in the title seem to refer to the insurgents who wanted religious toleration and an end to feudal oppression, and were thus far ahead of their times. In the prologue, Maderthaner mentioned that he was inspired by Karl Kautsky, a Marxist theorist and historian.

The first chapter begins with the future Pope Pius II, Aeneas Piccolomini's horror at the religious practices of the Bohemian Hussites, who rejected transubstantiation, clerical vestments, monasticism, purgatory, daily masses for the dead, as well as Last Rites and oral confession. Jan Huss preached that one should believe in God, not in the Church. Piccolomini suggested that the Hussites should be removed from society and placed in camps and forced to break rocks, rather like later 20th century concentration camps. The Hussites were saved by the brilliant military leadership of Jan Zizka. According to legend Jan Zizka had his skin tanned after his death and made into a drum to rally the Bohemian people in time of danger. This era of religious diversity in Bohemia came to a final end with the Habsburg victory by Emperor Ferdinand II at the battle of White Mountain in November 1620 during the early stages of the Thirty Years' War.

During the Great Hungarian Peasant Uprising of 1514, the rebels stormed the nobles' estates and burned and destroyed their property as well as annihilated all sorts of property and documents. After the defeat of the rebellion in Hungary and the horrendous execution of its leader, Gyorgy Dozsa Szekely, the authorities decided not to execute the peasants because they constituted most of the wealth of the nobility. Instead, the nobility tried to force the peasants further into serfdom.

In the Tirol and Salzburg, there were big centers of mining for salt, silver, copper, and gold. The Fugger family of Augsburg held the lease on mines in Schwaz and were said to receive 200,000 Gulden a year in income from these mines. The demand for wood to support the mining and smelting created conflict with the peasants. During the Peasants' War of 1525-1526 in Austria and Salzburg, an insurgent army of peasants and miners under the leadership of Michael Gruber won a rare victory over the princes' army at Schladming. This was the greatest victory by the rebels in the entire Peasants' War. In retribution for the victory, the city of Schladming was burned to the ground and its fortifications were destroyed. Schladming would not achieve the status of a city again for almost four hundred years until the end of the Habsburg dynasty. The clear goal of the unsuccessful rebellion in the Archbishopric of Salzburg was the secularization of the Archbishopric.

After the failed siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks in 1683, Prince Eugene of Savoy was able to conquer Hungary. The Habsburgs wanted to suppress Protestants in their territory, including many Calvinist nobles. Antonio Caraffa, a count from Naples who was employed by the Habsburgs, began a campaign of torture and executions in an attempt to suppress Protestantism in Hungary. Those who were executed had their heads posted on the city gates. Influential people close to the Emperor intervened to stop the torture campaign.

A Hungarian nobleman, Prince Rakoczi, led a revolt against the Habsburgs during the War of Spanish Succession, 1702-1714, when the Habsburgs were fighting against the French and King Louis XIV. Rakoczi had connections to the French. His insurgents waged a Guerilla war against the Habsburgs before that term was coined during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. Ultimately, the rebellion was ended by a treaty and widespread amnesty. Prince Rakoczi managed to escape to France where he wrote his memoirs. Later, he went to the Ottoman Empire where he died a natural death in 1735.

Maria Theresa acquired the province of Galicia around Lemberg (today Lviv in the Ukraine) in 1772 during the first partition of Poland. She sent a trusted confessor to survey the new territory. He reported back to her that it was a land full of Jews and lice. Emperor Joseph II was more religiously tolerant than his mother. He attempted to modernize his empire and create a bureaucratic revolution. His efforts to improve living conditions in his empire, including Galicia, ended in disillusion and debacle. Part of the problem of Galicia was that Polish nobles were more numerous than in other parts of Europe, some twelve percent of the population. They were tax-free and had almost limitless rights to demand labor services (or Robot) from the peasants. Many nobles ruled in a despotic manner and treated their serfs like slaves in the American south.

After the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, the Tsar received what became known as Congress Poland, ruled personally by the Tsar. The defeat of the Revolution of 1830 in Poland led to a wave of repression by the Tsars. Some Polish nationalists moved to Galicia, but others, like Frederik Chopin, fled to Paris. In the 1840s, whole regions of Europe were in recession and people were suffering from hunger. In February 1846, the Polish nobles attempted a revolution. The Polish peasants turned against the nobility for centuries of oppression. Concepts of Fatherland and Nation were alien to the peasants. Armed with scythes, pitchforks, and flails, the peasants murdered the nobility. An estimated one thousand nobles were murdered by their own peasants and more than four hundred estates were plundered and burned to the ground. After the Habsburgs re-established order in Galicia, the region remained calm during the Great Revolutions of 1848.

Maderthaner should be commended for highlighting these five rather obscure uprisings over more than four centuries. His sympathy was clearly with the insurgents. The Hussites and Taborites were included despite the fact that Bohemia was not part of the Habsburg lands until 1526. This reviewer could have wished for some maps of the shifting political boundaries of Hungary to aid in following the narrative there. The author's research over events spanning more than four hundred years was impressive.

Roy L. Vice