... 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.'
Grandin’s book demonstrates that American myths about open frontiers have always been dangerously simplistic, covering up inequality and violence both at home and abroad ... Grandin’s treatment of that border is among the book’s freshest and most illuminating portions, and also the most disturbing in a work already full of Confederate flags and patriotic gore ... Grandin provides a vivid account of the politics of international trade and financial liberalization in the 1990s ... As Grandin demonstrates compellingly, the notion of an infinite frontier has helped Americans evade a material dilemma ... There aren’t many heroes in The End of the Myth, but Grandin does offer us some ... Grandin is well aware that his argument here is not new ... Grandin gives us a vivid update of [legal scholar Aziz Rana's] argument for a time when [Andrew] Jackson’s ghost is once again roaming the land, otherwise known as the Trump era.
... a book I would recommend to President Trump in particular, though of course he wouldn’t read it ... brilliant, blistering ... as bracing an analysis of post-2016 America as any I have read. Grandin’s book is so sharply argued, so rooted in careful historical detail, so morally clear, that it makes a strong claim to be the most essential political text yet to emerge from the shock of Trump’s election ... One essential use of a historical analysis like Grandin’s is to reopen inquiry into lost possibilities, to pay attention to what the present has muted, to discover the hand of contingency in what is treated as inevitable.
Grandin’s book will work best for people with an appetite for sweeping intellectual history. A stickler might wonder how closely our anti-immigrant fervor can be tied to the idea of the American frontier, at a time when other wealthy countries without an equivalent frontier past are also in the grip of anti-immigrant backlashes ... Grandin’s argument is valuable as a provocative interpretation, an ambitious dash through American history with an eye to framing our current moment and its political psychology ... [an] elegant historical sketch.
... an essential, sweeping history of the American frontier ... In this book, [Grandin] moves easily between historical events and tracing the political thought that accompanied and explicated them ... Grandin offers brutal details... that illustrate the connection between violence and power ... In the book, Jackson serves to illustrate a train of American thought: that we must have freedom from restriction coupled with our freedom to settle and pursue happiness.
... Grandin unflinchingly describes the savagery of U.S. troops during the conquest of the country’s continental neighbor ... Grandin’s chapters on the Border Patrol make evident the origins of many of today’s most egregious border-enforcement practices ... As a member of the patrol, I never witnessed anything as straightforwardly depraved as the beatings, torture, rape, and murder Grandin describes. But I often heard romanticized stories of 'the old patrol,' a lament for the days when agents had free rein across the borderlands ... Part of Grandin’s achievement in The End of the Myth is to situate today’s calls to fortify our borders in relation to the centuries of racial animus that preceded them ... If there is something missing from Grandin’s study of the frontier, it is that the vast scope of his history leaves little room for readers to encounter stories on an individual human scale, to grapple with the more intimate effects of decades of militarism on the border ... But the fact that we rarely hear their voices in The End of the Myth is perhaps less Grandin’s failure than it is the failure of the historical record to capture the voices, bodies, and places that have always had the least access to documentation.
The frontier, Grandin argues, is finally closed ... The End of the Myth is a powerful and painful book, clear-sighted, meticulous and damning. Grandin writes with learned, punchy elegance, as attentive to the broad sweep of his narrative as he is to the fine details of each era. He excels at revealing the hidden ancestry, usually un-pretty, of contemporary rightwing tropes.
... a valuable contribution to our understanding of the fractious debate over immigration and the attendant controversy over a wall along the United States’ southern border ... Relying on a rich trove of source materials, both primary and secondary, Grandin pointedly contends that this mythic 'Edenic utopia' has now been eclipsed by the shadow of a concrete and steel border wall ... Regardless of whether one accepts Grandin’s Manichaean prophecy, with all the bitterness of the conflict it foretells, there is no escaping the need to come to terms with the painful legacy that’s meticulously revisited in this unsettling book.
