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mmccombs's review against another edition
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Woof. This book was so informative and has shifted a lot of my ideas about what empire means and what the US’s place is in that. I really didn’t know much of this history and YIKES I needed this geography and history lesson. There are so many unsung histories and colonized people lost to time and malicious “miscounting” by an empire hard pressed to not look like one. This was a good overview and was approachable, lots of info was presented without it being too much (the chapter on standardization was a bit dull, though it was still useful to his overall argument. But screw thread angles! Who knew!). I will say I didn’t really love the way this book was organized (I often felt confused about when or where we were in time, people we were introduced to earlier came back but I forgot their names, etc). He also spent a huge chunk of this book on WWII which obviously is a huge turning point in our history of empire, but I’m unsure it needed so much attention. It was also quite hard to read sometimes, a fair amount of racial slurs and fairly vivid descriptions of violence were used (I think generally in a way that painted a clearer picture, but it sometimes felt gratuitous). All in all, this was a really impactful history that has helped me think about the US in a new, much more critical way.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, Sexual violence, Rape, Death, Colonisation, Racial slurs, Violence, War, Slavery, Racism, Murder, Genocide, and Gun violence
Moderate: Homophobia
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