Reviews with content warning for Torture - How to Hide an Empire

An excellent dive into U.S. imperialism and how it has shaped both the U.S. today and the modern global order. From the settler-colonial violence of Manifest Destiny to the 60 degree thread pitch of standard U.S. screws to the fallout (political and literal) of nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll, this book covers a vast array of dramatically overlooked topics that are essential to understanding why the world is the way it is today. Though academically rigorous, the writing is entertaining and easy to digest, and Immerwahr does a good job of giving serious topics the gravity they deserve while also including moments of levity and humor where appropriate.

Even as someone profoundly interested in and generally well educated on U.S. settler-colonialism, I learned a huge amount of new information that reframed my understanding of the U.S. from this book.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in truly understanding U.S. history, and should be required reading in any U.S. history curriculum.

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spicewitch's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative medium-paced

4.0

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faduma's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective tense slow-paced

4.0

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mmccombs's review

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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.

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amandabrown's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

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ariel_bloomer's review against another edition

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challenging informative tense medium-paced

4.0

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