MixedThe NationNeiman aims to encourage American efforts at a grim time. It might be easy for a critic to argue that Americans have already missed the...boat ... This idiosyncratic degree of optimism—treating a century and a half of intransigence as evidence that Americans can evolve—is deliberate. The book is a compare and contrast in two case studies. But it’s also, as Neiman acknowledges, undergirded by a broader idea most often associated with Enlightenment-era thinking: that history is fundamentally progressive—things get better over time ... indeed the book is more persuasive at a theoretical and intuitive level than at an empirical one. There are a few notable omissions—for example, in the section praising the Treptow monument to fallen Soviet soldiers, she fails to discuss the mass rape suffered by German women at the hands of the Red Army ... Inattention to economic context also complicates an otherwise very persuasive case for reparations ... Most importantly, the idea that Trump’s presidency rests on Southern denial—however intuitively persuasive—skates past some pesky particulars ... Addressing racial inequality and injustice in the United States today is a much larger task than Neiman seems to propose.
