A review by xanderband
Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments by Erin Thompson

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>