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Reviews tagging 'Racism'
Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation by David French
1 review
ajparmentier's review against another edition
1.0
I have four main issues with this book:
1. The entire middle section is essentially three long "what if" scenarios. This is outlined in the book road map in the introduction but then not stated again in the text. So it is incredibly easy to not understand that's what's going on until a ways into the first scenario. The first scenario is written just vaguely enough and close enough to truth that it feels like news stories you might've forgotten. This is entirely the point, but there needed to be another paragraph at the beginning of that section or the end of the previous section that just reiterates "now we're going to talk about some what if scenarios" to avoid confusion. I led a community book discussion on this and it was a major source of confusion to a lot of the attendees.
2. The author claims to be very in the middle with his political beliefs, but as the book goes on you can tell that that's actually not true. I don't care about what beliefs the author holds, but I think if you are going to claim neutrality, you have to actually back it up. I think it's possible to write a book from a place of "I believe in this side's belief, but I can use empathy and talk about what the other side believes", but in order to do that successfully you have to actually be honest. He also was a big fan of holding up two things and making claims of false equivalence about them. Not every single thing has two exactly equal sides. And not every single grievance the political Right and political Left have against each other has an exactly equal grievance on the other side. That's fine. We can talk about each of those grievances/issues separately. But the author didn't want to do that.
3. The author makes quite a lot of claims throughout the book about research studies and such, but never backs up these claims with hard facts or provides enough sources for his facts. He also cites plenty of studies without doing work to establish if the studies/surveys were conducted with acceptable rigorousness. It was very frustrating, because all of the data and stats he cited might be true but he didn't give me enough evidence of his own due diligence in checking out those facts for me to believe him.
4. It's just not well-written. I'm not expecting academic prose at all, because this book is aimed at the general population so it should be written in an accessible and more informal style. But it's just not well-written on a sentence by sentence level. :-( I tried to be nice about it, but it was a hard slog to get through this book.
An absolutely unpleasant read that didn't even make me feel better equipped to have productive political conversations or really understand other parts of the political spectrum.
1. The entire middle section is essentially three long "what if" scenarios. This is outlined in the book road map in the introduction but then not stated again in the text. So it is incredibly easy to not understand that's what's going on until a ways into the first scenario. The first scenario is written just vaguely enough and close enough to truth that it feels like news stories you might've forgotten. This is entirely the point, but there needed to be another paragraph at the beginning of that section or the end of the previous section that just reiterates "now we're going to talk about some what if scenarios" to avoid confusion. I led a community book discussion on this and it was a major source of confusion to a lot of the attendees.
2. The author claims to be very in the middle with his political beliefs, but as the book goes on you can tell that that's actually not true. I don't care about what beliefs the author holds, but I think if you are going to claim neutrality, you have to actually back it up. I think it's possible to write a book from a place of "I believe in this side's belief, but I can use empathy and talk about what the other side believes", but in order to do that successfully you have to actually be honest. He also was a big fan of holding up two things and making claims of false equivalence about them. Not every single thing has two exactly equal sides. And not every single grievance the political Right and political Left have against each other has an exactly equal grievance on the other side. That's fine. We can talk about each of those grievances/issues separately. But the author didn't want to do that.
3. The author makes quite a lot of claims throughout the book about research studies and such, but never backs up these claims with hard facts or provides enough sources for his facts. He also cites plenty of studies without doing work to establish if the studies/surveys were conducted with acceptable rigorousness. It was very frustrating, because all of the data and stats he cited might be true but he didn't give me enough evidence of his own due diligence in checking out those facts for me to believe him.
4. It's just not well-written. I'm not expecting academic prose at all, because this book is aimed at the general population so it should be written in an accessible and more informal style. But it's just not well-written on a sentence by sentence level. :-( I tried to be nice about it, but it was a hard slog to get through this book.
An absolutely unpleasant read that didn't even make me feel better equipped to have productive political conversations or really understand other parts of the political spectrum.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny and Homophobia
Moderate: Transphobia and Racism
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