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xanderband's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
A really fantastic look at a niche but important topic: how the US wants to portray itself and the power of who, where, and what is memorialized. Importantly, it looks fairly holistically at what to do with monuments a community disagrees with: activist responses and tearing them down, really exploring what "putting it in a museum" actually requires, to the formal processes and the roadblocks that are put in place to halt formal measures.
Some favorite parts: the scam-ridden history of stone mountain, the way "shaft" Confederate monuments were part of the rewriting Civil War and white southern identity, and the way Thompson centers monuments as a projection of image and power </ spoiler>
Some favorite parts:
kwnreads's review against another edition
5.0
This book is phenomenal. Even though I study monuments and public art, I learned so much about how monuments come to be taken down, reshuffled, or left in their spot. The chapter on Stone Mountain alone should win awards. I was shocked by what I read!
tonyxbooks's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
tense
medium-paced
5.0
ametcalf's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
iamkallia's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
When we see that a monument shows some people as inferior, we assume it acts as a cheery pat on the back to the people it claims are superior. But sometimes a pat on the back can push you into danger. When we think a monument flatters us or our ancestors, we need to look very carefully to see just what part of our history it praises and just what it wants our future to be.
This book was full of so many really impactful quotes, it was hard to narrow it down to just one, the way I usually like to introduce my reviews. The author was very good at making a statement, and a powerful one.
I didn't know a ton about the statue vs. no-statue debate, but when I was still in college I studied history, and had made my decision based mostly on that. The way I have always viewed it, is that we learn history from books, not from hunks of metal or stone. And this book did a very good job of confirming my biases.
But, in all seriousness, this book was very concise at explaining both the beginning of statues being torn down by the populous, such as with a statue of George III before we were even truly a country, to the more modern day. It also helped explain that sometimes, pulling a statue down ourselves is the only real option. So many Southern states have done more in the last few years to protect the rights of statues than their own people.
This book was full of so many really impactful quotes, it was hard to narrow it down to just one, the way I usually like to introduce my reviews. The author was very good at making a statement, and a powerful one.
I didn't know a ton about the statue vs. no-statue debate, but when I was still in college I studied history, and had made my decision based mostly on that. The way I have always viewed it, is that we learn history from books, not from hunks of metal or stone. And this book did a very good job of confirming my biases.
But, in all seriousness, this book was very concise at explaining both the beginning of statues being torn down by the populous, such as with a statue of George III before we were even truly a country, to the more modern day. It also helped explain that sometimes, pulling a statue down ourselves is the only real option. So many Southern states have done more in the last few years to protect the rights of statues than their own people.