Colin Woodard, 2011
Ugh.
So it was fun at first. If it had been fiction it would have been more than decent concerning world-building, but it was not intended to be fiction.
I could buy into the book’s premise initially. That the U.S. has these regional cultures with different backgrounds, insecurities, and desires, and these elements often result in political conflict. His all-too-brief descriptions of major migrations also seem accurate enough.
And that’s it. Everything else seems to be based on the author’s personal feelings about the different regions and their histories, or at least what he bothered to know about them. He takes broad stretches of land and singularly describes every person who would have lived there, like some localized hive mind. It’s a tone for long-form travel ads, not one that has any interest in analyses. The author clearly hates the South and obviously loves New England. Guess where this clown lives, then guess what kind of think tank he’s the director of.
In spite of the author’s narrow-mindedness, the book manages to stay enjoyable for the first half or so. But if I ever re-read it, I would consider every chapter as “this former Politico editor’s idea of this region”. This likely won’t happen, because the book really went to shit in the second half, and for two reasons:
- By the time you get here, you realize how lazy this writer is. All pop and no real meat. He recycles chapter openers and reads like he followed the same beat formula over and over. So many quotes left uncited. It comes off like he dictated the book more than wrote it. And he has an annoying habit of putting his own little cutesy phrases in gimmicky quotations for no clear reason I can think of beyond the author being a coward who doesn’t want to take responsibility for his claims.
- It doesn’t get better. The last few chapters are presented as some thoughtful review of each region’s particular issues and what he thinks can be done to alleviate them. It could have been an interesting segment if the book was written by a good writer. It comes out to New England being just too nice and dreamy, maybe a little bossy, but they only mean well and know best. The South, on the other hand, is hellish and irredeemable and nothing will ever fix it. The same people who brought slaves rule the land like ghost kings, so everyone must die, disappear, or conform and allow northerners to take care of everything. For everywhere else, he seems to have forgotten what he was going to say because he just paraphrases the same shit from the first half of the book all over again. The fucking twerp.
Any star out of five feels too generous. The book can have one because the map is neat enough for about two minutes. And it could have maybe been a decent book if someone else had written it, but it was made by this guy, who should be quarantined to r/politics with the rest of his kind for the remainder of his writing career.
The Normal Times 