From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall.
... profoundly insightful and deeply sobering ... The End of the Myth is challenging intellectual and cultural history ... But Grandin’s gift for clear and engaging writing makes The End of the Myth as accessible and enthralling a read ... Much of the history Grandin incorporates into this new book is utterly captivating in his hands, and often revelatory. What’s perhaps most remarkable about The End of the Myth is the cohesion Grandin achieves in convincingly connecting the disparate strands of history he collects in the book. This makes the gravity of his conclusions on our current predicament all the more unsettling.
... fine, elegantly written ... Grandin is a fine explainer with a knack for pithy summary ... Grandin keeps his cool — he prefers the stiletto to the club — but he grows angrier as his history reaches the present day.
Grandin’s history of the frontier 'in the mind of America' unravels [Frederick Jackson] Turner’s thesis—with due acknowledgment of its poetic qualities—and puts Trump’s white supremacy in a longer perspective ... As a corrective, Grandin’s book balloons into a short history of the United States, with an emphasis on the racial terror, official and unofficial, that marked the story from the start ... Grandin isn’t short of eye-popping evidence for the 'blood-soaked entitlement' that underpinned [the American 'frontier'] ... Grandin—a gifted scholar and storyteller who’s best known as a Latin Americanist—writes powerfully about anti-immigrant nativism’s return from the margins as a 'border-fication of national politics.'
