Book Review: Disunited Nations

I have a love/hate relationship with Peter Zeihan's new book, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in a Disunited World.

Let's start with the bad news first.

Apart from editorial asides by the author, the book has no footnotes. The bibliography only includes five titles. There is no reference to historical models of geopolitics. Facts are offered without citations. Now I'm not a great fan of scholarship--academic monographs are not just boring, but useless. Reading through a forest of footnotes is tedious.

But without any context I have no way to know how trustworthy Mr. Zeihan's sources are. Is he just cherry-picking factoids to fit his story? Is he really such a genius that he can develop a whole geopolitical theory de novo out of thin air?

Is the man a serious thinker?--or merely a huckster trolling for consulting dollars? Yes, and yes.

I loved this book!

For clarity and concision it is unmatched. He tells a simple (too simple by half) story of the globe's future for the next generation. Story is the operative word--the book reads like a well-plotted novel. That makes me suspicious (is life really that straightforward?), but it's very readable. I think he's wrong in big ways, as I'll explain below. But the basic story seems true enough.

It goes like this:

After WWII, the Soviet Union, despite its intrinsic weaknesses, represented an existential threat to the United States. Our ingenious counter was to mobilize the world to our side. This was not done by brute force, nor by appeal to humanitarian principles. For the most part we bribed other countries to be our allies. The bribe consisted of three parts:

1. The US will guarantee your current borders. You do not need to defend yourself against your neighbors.
2. The US will guarantee your trade routes. Our navy will patrol the world and keep the seas free of pirates and military foes. Not merely was transit through the Panama and Suez canals open to all, but also through the Malacca, Hormuz, and even the Bosporus Straits.
3. The US market was open to your produce nearly without restriction. Whether German cars, Japanese electronics, Bengali textiles, or Chinese toys--anybody could sell anything in the USA tariff-free.

It worked like a charm. Apart from the US and the Soviet Union, military spending decreased around the globe. The NATO allies, for example, couldn't rouse themselves to even spend 2% of their GDP on defense. Piracy and privateering on the high seas, along with toll-collecting at choke points disappeared. Countries as diverse as Germany, South Korea and China got rich selling into US market.

The world got rich, including the United States. Mr. Zeihan refers to this era--from 1945 to nearly the present day--as the post-war Order. But now the Order is breaking down, again for three reasons.

1. The Soviet Union is no more. The empire collapsed in 1991, and the successor state, Russia, is itself in terminal, demographic decline (so claims Zeihan).
2. Fracking changes everything. North America is now energy independent, and indeed, we're a net energy exporter. The result is we have little cause to police the Middle East anymore, and certainly not the Persian Gulf or the Straits of Hormuz.
3. While in 1950 the US produced about 50% of global gdp, today the number is only 25%. That's certainly not because the US is poorer, but rather because the Order hugely increased wealth globally. Thus we can no longer serve as a market of last resort, nor can we cover the world's defense costs.

As said, it's too simple by half. While the Soviets inspired NATO, it seems unlikely that they were the only reason for the Order. Surely American business understood the virtue of global markets, even in 1945. There were strong economic reasons for the Order. Accordingly, the collapse of the Soviets did not presage the imminent demise of the Order--it's hung on for nigh 30 years--again for its economic benefits.

Mr. Zeihan's tale leaves out some important trends. New technology spread around the world--the rise in global wealth is as much due to that as the American policeman. The Order’s decline may be due to a sharp drop in global productivity beginning in the mid '70s as much as anything else. Indeed, Mr. Zeihan’s story depends too heavily on geography and demographics--important topics to be sure, but not necessarily more important than technology, history, culture, or even genetics.

Still, I think he's mostly right, and the Order's inevitable demise may lead to the consequences he foretells. I think he's right about China. I think he's wrong about Germany.

China has five existential problems, and while it might survive one or two of them, solving all five of them simultaneously is impossible. The Chinese economy will crash, and Zeihan predicts the country will not survive as a unitary state. The five issues are:

1. While Americans do farming, the Chinese do gardening. This is because they had a surplus of agricultural labor, and gardening is more productive per acre than farming. By shipping labor off to the cities, China was forced into mechanized farming, which hasn't worked too well. Despite the huge capital investment, agricultural productivity has not grown proportionately. Mr. Zeihan predicts famine in China's near future.
2. China has over-invested in housing. Housing is the primary investment tool for middle-class Chinese, including many second- and vacation- homes, similar to what the stock market is in the US. By building too many houses, there will inevitably be a crash in prices, wiping out the wealth of much of the population.
3. Chinese demography is terrible. Unlike the US (with our large Millennial Generation), Chinese baby boomers were limited to one child each. Thus China is older than the United States, and it's labor force is actually shrinking. It's very difficult to grow an economy when your labor force is shrinking and the bulk of your population is retiring.
4. China has insufficient natural resources. It produces very little of its own energy, importing most from the Persian Gulf (to which, absent the US Navy, access is not guaranteed). It can't produce enough food to feed itself, and also must import the fertilizers and other inputs for its agriculture. Given the shortage of labor, the reversion to labor-intensive gardening looks unlikely. 
5. China is too big to be an export power. Economic success depends on a sharp increase in domestic consumption. But consumers are in the ages 30-50 demographic, i.e., the generation that doesn't exist in sufficient numbers in China. And they're not having any children, either. The result is Chinese consumption is purchased only by government debt, i.e., the government buying all kinds of products that citizens can no longer consume. Every financial institution in the country is insolvent. It will end badly.

Moral: Don't invest money in China!

Now for Germany: Mr. Zeihan takes the Marxist saw too literally: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce. The "Germans" invaded Russia first in 1914, and then again in 1940. Contrary to Marx, Mr. Zeihan thinks they'll do it a third time. I believe he's ignoring history.

There were three "German" empires (Reich). The First Reich was under Charlemagne, founded in the Eighth Century, and that really was a German empire (without scare quotes). The capital was in Aachen, in the Rhineland. The Second Reich was founded by Bismarck in 1871, with it's capital in Berlin. But it wasn't really a German Empire, but rather a Prussian one.

The Prussians are originally a Baltic people--Old Prussian, spoken until the 18th Century, is related to Lithuanian. Ancestral Prussians lived in what became known as East Prussia, today parts of Lithuania and northeast Poland. They were first conquered by one of Charlemagne's heirs, and took to German language and culture with some enthusiasm. But they are not ethnic Germans--neither then nor now. They're Prussian. Mr. Zeihan seems to think they're just another species of "German."

Bismarck was very aware of this--his goal was a Prussian empire, not a German one. Indeed, he wanted the Kaiser to be dubbed the Emperor of the Germans rather than the German Emperor (it is only by accident that he didn't get his wish). He treated Germany proper (the Rhineland, Baden-Wurttemburg, Bavaria and Austria, along with Alsace and Lorraine--i.e., Catholic or Roman Germany) as colonies to be exploited. (This was especially true in Alsace and Lorraine.)

And even though Hitler was an ethnic German, the Third Reich was also a Prussian empire, not a German one. It's the Prussians who had an issue with Russia. The Drang nach Osten was never a German emotion, but solely a Prussian one.

In the meantime, Prussia has been completely destroyed. They've been ethnically cleansed from their native homeland. Today they live mostly in the former East Germany--a geography that has long been a Prussian satrapy. Berlin is the capital of Prussia, not Germany.

The Germans, properly understood, have no cause to pick a fight with Russia. And I doubt the Prussians have the resources to even think about it. More likely is Germany will re-divide into two states along the former iron curtain: proper Germany to the West, and a rump Prussia in the East.

I don't think Mr. Zeihan's story about Germany makes much sense, for this and other reasons. But his book is a lot of fun and well worth reading.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• Comrade Keith L. Writes About China
• Book Review: The Absent Superpower

Book Review: From Fire, By Water

Author Sohrab Ahmari's memoir is entitled From Fire, By Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith.

I first encountered Mr. Ahmari's writing in the pages of Commentary Magazine, the only print periodical to which I still subscribe. I do so because the writing is unfailingly excellent and about topics that interest me. Mr. Ahmari's contributions were no exception. In my mind's eye I pictured him as an old, wizened Iranian Jew, highly educated and long since exiled from his homeland.

So it was a shock to learn that he was born in Tehran in 1985, and raised in a nominally Muslim, mostly secular, upper-middle class family who imagined themselves to be "intellectuals." He and his mother emigrated to America when he was 13 years old, settling in (of all places) rural Utah. There he finished high school and attended college at Utah State, eventually graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Washington.

So I'm a sucker for the spiritual journey memoir. The first one I read many years ago was Thomas Merton's famous Seven Storey Mountain, a book describing his journey to a Trappist monastery. I even enjoy the genre in movies--among the few films I have watched more than once is the low-brow rom-com Finding Normal. While not explicitly churchy, the lady protagonist finds love, faith and happiness in small town Normal, Louisiana.

A spiritual journey typically involves a descent into "hell" (my term) followed by a climb back into the light. That is precisely the path followed by our protagonist, including a lot of drinking and loose living. Mostly it's an intellectual journey, beginning with the faux-intellectualism of his youth and bottoming out in dissolution.

Of specific interest to this blog's readers is his stop on the way down at Trotskyism. While a student at Utah State (must've been around 2003) he contacted a grouplet in Salt Lake City called the Worker's Alliance, supposedly affiliated with the Fourth International. They published a newspaper called Equity. I have never heard of this organization before, which given the plethora of Trotskyist grouplets is not surprising. But Google doesn't help--a search for Worker's Alliance or Equity turns up no relevant results.

My hunch is that our author has changed the names so as not to embarrass anybody.

Mr. Ahmari, now committed to his new ideology, moves to Seattle where the national headquarters was located, and to complete his education at UW. The only Trotskyist organization I know of headquartered in Seattle is the Freedom Socialist Party, along with sundry splinter sects therefrom. But that group is centered more around a bespoke version of feminism than Trotskyism--a topic never mentioned in the book.

One more odd thing: Mr. Ahmari refers to his comrades as "Trotskyites," a name that in our day we found insulting and derogatory. It was the term of abuse Stalinists employed against us. Accordingly we always called ourselves "Trotskyists." Though by 2003 the Stalin/Trotsky thing may have faded into history, and perhaps that bit of political correctness was no longer necessary.

Apart from walking a few picket lines, Mr. Ahmari didn't do very much. He never reports writing for their newspaper--a natural thing for him to do. Mostly he engaged in long conversations that he perceived as indoctrination sessions. For him, Trotskyism was an intellectual waystation--there was very little about it of practical significance. In my day we would have called him a dilettante--I don't think he'd disagree with that description.

Though the book is overwhelmingly intellectual, in one episode reality breaks through. Our author is locked in a room with a bunch of very poor, very desperate men about to embark on a dangerous and illegal journey, and for whom there was no turning back. Naturally, in that environment some people behave badly. In his words:

[The] house was a kind of charnel pit or Sheol, though the people in it were yet alive. It was a void, though it existed within the boundaries of space and time. It was on fire with degradation--and sin.

I wasn't there, so I don't know. But from his account I think he overstates the case. Yes, bad things happened. But there were also small acts of heroism and charity. There was degradation--but more because of poverty, panic and desperation than sin. Describing it as "Sheol" seems uncharitable.

Rather than spiritual journey, another way to read the book is as a coming of age story. In this it is remarkably similar to Hillbilly Elegy (my review here), authored by J.D. Vance. Unlike Mr. Ahmari, Mr. Vance didn't descend into "hell," but rather was born there. And the rise wasn't spiritual as much as sociological or political. Both of them found their calling at about age 30, which I think is when the (male) personality reaches maturity. (My history is similar.)

Mr. Vance, at least, is accompanied on his journey by other people, notably his sister, Lindsay. The book is as much about his grandparents as it is about him. But he acquires a wife only at the end--she arrives as a reward for successfully coming of age.

By contrast, Mr. Ahmari travels alone. His grandparents figure in the first chapter, and his mother also during the first years in Utah. But once he leaves home we barely hear from them again. I, for one, wanted very much to know how his mother made out. Unlike Mr. Vance, he gets married midway through his sojourn. The new bride makes a cameo appearance, after which he leaves her for London where he embarks on becoming a Catholic by himself.

Mrs. Ahmari must have been present (on the most important day of his life) when he'd "have the archdiocese convalidate my civil marriage." But she's not mentioned by name, and even the grammar of the sentence suggests she wasn't even there. She plays absolutely no part in his conversion, and behaves like she's a wooden post.

Weird.

There's probably an innocent explanation. Perhaps Mrs. Ahmari enjoys her privacy and doesn't want to be in the book? Or maybe he's convinced that conversion is an internal affair of the heart--solely a matter between him and God? Whatever--he comes across as a selfish cad.

How different this is from the movie Finding Normal, where the beloved is not only a suitor, but also an agent of transformation. It's the romance that makes the movie, and the movie can then carry the underlying message of faith, hope and love.

I have one more nit to pick, and only because I'm a certified geographical pedant. Mr. Ahmari's knowledge of our country's geography is simply appalling! Brownsville is not anywhere close to the Texas panhandle, nor is California north of Texas. I'm astonished that such obvious errors got by the book editors.

The above paints too negative a picture. I actually enjoyed this book--a lot. Mr. Ahmari is a good writer, it's an engaging read, I'm a fan of the genre, and it's not too long. I read it over two or three evenings just before bedtime. Beyond journeys, spiritual or otherwise, you'll learn a lot about both Iran and Utah. My review leaves out the good stuff. In part that's on purpose--go read the book for yourself.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: An Anxious Age
• Book Review: Trotsky
• Book Review: Lord of the World
• Dorothy Day

Summary Statement of US Strategic Goals for the Coming Period

I've been doing some reading and thinking about geopolitics,* and I think I can express America's foreign policy goals succinctly and clearly:

• The Eurasian continent consists of four "empires" and several smaller "kingdoms". The empires are China, Russia, South Asia, and Europe. The kingdoms include Japan, Indonesia, Persia, and Turkey. I don't mean these countries within their current political boundaries, but rather their cultural/strategic spheres. For example, for Russia that means the former Soviet Union. Turkey is the old Ottoman Empire, plus much of Central Asia and Xinjiang. Persia includes parts of Central Asia, Kurdistan, and half of Afghanistan. South Asia is the whole subcontinent, from Kabul to Dhaka to Columbo, and maybe also Tibet. Only for China do current borders roughly correspond to empire.
• None of these empires constitutes an essential threat to the United States in their current form. We can defend against any of them individually.
• The danger comes if one of these empires makes an alliance with the others (or conquers them). Our vital strategic interest is to prevent that from happening. Therefore, for example, we defended Stalin against Hitler, certainly not for moral reasons, but the combination of Europe and Russia potentially augured an entity that would be a vital threat to the United States. So we helped preserve the Soviet Union.
• The situation is more complicated because Russia is in terminal demographic decline and will cease to be an empire within a generation or two. Its geographic space will be fought over by Europe, Turkey, China, Japan, and Persia. The US vital interest is that none of these kingdoms should win too big a slice.

So this makes US foreign policy spectacularly clear. In the immediate term it has four major goals:

1. Retain naval hegemony over the South China Sea. This prevents Chinese aggression/alliance with India, and vice versa. Plus it allows us to trade with SE Asia.
2. Retain control over Afghanistan, which borders several of the above empires and kingdoms: Persia, South Asia, China, Turkey. Indeed, Afghanistan is probably the most strategic piece of ground on the planet. We don't really care what their internal government is, but we insist that none of its neighbors win control over the place. We're gonna have troops in Afghanistan for decades to come.
3. Harass terrorist groups sufficiently to deny them control over any territory, and so they never acquire any substantial military capability.
4. Prevent further nuclear proliferation, most immediately in North Korea.

This has some interesting implications for current conflict zones. Consider Syria.

• One goal in Syria and Iraq is to deny Iran control over the Fertile Crescent and the Levant. Toward this end Turkey, the Syrian/Sunni rebels, and Israel are our allies.
• Another goal is to prevent the rise of ISIS, al-Qaeda, or any other terrorist organization that potentially threatens the US. Our allies here are the Kurds and the Assad regime.
• A third goal is to prevent Turkey and Sunni rebels from destroying Kurdish and Alawite populations. Our allies here are Assad and Iran.
• A fourth goal is to prevent the mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Syria's Sunni population, many of whom have become refugees in Europe. Our enemies here are Assad and Russia. The latter is using this as a lever to destabilize NATO and the EU.
• The Kurds are a people with divided loyalties. On the one hand they speak a Persian language, unrelated to either Arabic or Turkish (apart from some loan words). On the other hand, they are Sunni and at odds with the Shi'a theocracy in Tehran. Should Iran ever have a secular government then likely the Kurds would become Iranian allies. This is why the Turks are so terribly afraid of them and try very hard to suppress their language.

So it's a very complex battlefield, contrary to what Jeff Mackler, writing in Socialist Action maintains. He posits a mythical creature called "American Imperialism" which for some bizarre and unexplained reason wants to occupy Syria. Thus Mr. Mackler supports the Assad regime, who supposedly represent the progressive future of the human race. For him it's a case of white hats vs. black hats, with Americans wearing black. 

His support for Assad is shameful--sort of like supporting Pol Pot (which my Trotskyist friends also did). But no matter--it's just pseudo-revolutionary grandstanding. By taking a fake radical position, no matter how stupid and inconsequential, Socialist Action burnishes its credential on the American Left.

Nobody should take them seriously.

*Bibliography

Robert Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World

Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower (reviewed here)

Peter Zeihan, The Absent Superpower (reviewed here)

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Gorbachev
• New World Disorder
• North Korea

Book Review: Eleven Nations of North America

This post's heading is often how Colin Woodard's book is referred to, but the real title is American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, published in 2011. As someone interested in geography and politics I found it a fascinating and engaging read. I had originally resisted reading it thinking it was a rehash of Joel Garreau's 1982 book The Nine Nations of North America. It's not, and indeed it is much better--more scholarly, much more historical, and a lot more than Mr. Garreau's entertaining, anecdotal journalism.

For all that, I think Mr. Woodard's thesis is at least incomplete, if not outright wrong.

It begins promisingly enough, expanding on David Hackett Fisher's magisterial Albion's Seed, which describes four of the nations. For example, Yankeedom was founded by Puritan immigrants from East Anglia. They were the victors in England's Civil War, and came not as refugees, but rather as pilgrims. Their goal was to build "a city on a hill," i.e., a place closer to God, and where His chosen people can lead a more saintly life. The Yankees had no use for aristocrats or royalty, nor did they believe in freedom of religion. They despised the Anglican church, "popery", and the heretical Quakers. They passionately supported the American Revolution, providing the largest number of soldiers for that effort.

Yankeedom, according to Woodard, started in New England, but has since expanded to include the Canadian Maritimes, Upstate New York, and west to encompass Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota (along with bits of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois). Yankees believed in good government guided by religious truth.

They also colonized the Left Coast, that skinny stretch along our Pacific rim to the west of the Sierra/Cascade mountains, including San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. (Los Angeles is part of El Norte.)

By contrast, the Midlands was settled originally by Quakers, a heretical Christian sect who emigrated from the West Midlands--places like Lancashire and Cheshire. Unique among American colonists, they championed religious liberty and tolerance generally. Accordingly, they welcomed immigration from "friendly" people, e.g. German pietists such as the Amish, Mennonites, Anabaptists, etc. Because their ancestral home in England was strongly affected by Viking invasions, the Quakers share much with Scandinavians, both in heritage and culture, including gender equality, and indeed equality generally. Northern Delaware was settled by Swedes, who arrived upon Quaker invitation.

The Quakers themselves are not important today, but the immigrants they attracted still thrive and preserve most of their values. Among those are pacifism, which led them to tend Loyalist during the American Revolution, and not eager to join the Union cause during the Civil War. (The New Netherlanders, who lived in New York City and immediate environs, were stauncher Loyalists and Confederate sympathizers, albeit for different reasons.)

From Mr. Woodard's map, the Midlands today looks like a ridiculously gerrymandered congressional district, including most of Pennsylvania and South Jersey, central portions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, much of Missouri and Iowa, and the eastern parts of Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. Their Loyalist sympathies caused them to emigrate to Southern Ontario and Manitoba, where they still dominate the culture. Toronto, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis are Midlander cities.

Greater Appalachia was settled by people from the Scottish Borders, who Woodard dubs Borderlanders, but are more commonly known as Scots-Irish. They are the only colonists who truly supported democracy and individual rights, along with the ideal of rugged individualism. Tidewater (Chesapeake Bay) was settled by the aristocratic losers in the English civil war, who sought to recreate their lost British homeland. They produced men of great character and erudition, notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, without whom the Revolution should never have succeeded. The Deep South began in Charleston, SC, by immigrants from Barbados who wanted to expand their profitable slaveocracy beyond that small island. Unlike in Tidewater, for these people slavery was precisely the point of their existence.

And so on. Mr. Woodard recounts American history as a struggle between these and other nations for dominance in the federal government. While Virginia was the most populous state, Yankeedom was the most populous nation. They both hated the Quakers. The Borderlanders hated everybody, fighting against Southern aristocrats and Yankee "good government" meddlers alike. In the end it became a battle to prevent the Deep South from expanding too far, and then dominating the federal government. That, along with the Yankee's strong moral objections to slavery, led eventually to the Civil War.

And indeed, through the Civil War I find Mr. Woodard's story convincing. After that it becomes much less credible. I'll highlight three reasons why.

1.  African-Americans. Through most of the book Black people are slaves and have no further influence. Then they briefly become equally neutered sharecroppers. Only near the end do they acquire any agency at all in the form of the Civil Rights movement. During which Malcolm X is described as a "Yankee," in comparison to Martin Luther King, who is a "Deep Southerner." Really?

Within Mr. Woodard's framework African-Americans are probably deserving of their own nation, overlayed on top of the others such as what they do with area codes. Certainly their influence on American politics and culture grants them at least that importance. For example, American music is substantially of African-American heritage, and owes nothing to the Barbadian immigrants who founded the Deep South.

Indeed, I will go further and argue that most residual influence of the antebellum South is due to African-Americans.

2.  Technology. In 1840 it may have been reasonable for Southern plantation owners to think their slaveocracy might survive (though Tidewater's Thomas Jefferson doubted that even before the Revolution). But by 1860 surely the handwriting was on the wall--technology in the form of railroads and mechanization would eventually render slavery economically impossible.

The problems with slavery are twofold: it is a fundamentally unproductive use of labor, and it depends crucially on export markets for income, as slaves cannot become consumers. Both of those conditions made slavery uncompetitive on the world market.

After the war it turned into sharecropping, which at least incentivized the workforce a little better. By 1900 mechanization was in full force, the Southern farms became much more productive, and their former slaves migrated north to factories where their skills could be better used.

Exceptions notwithstanding, today's Southern Blacks--who populate shopping malls and live in middle class suburbs--are not desperately poor people under the thumb of some hopelessly cruel oligarchy. Yet oligarchy is precisely how Mr. Woodard describes the South, as if  Barbadian descendants still ran the show. Please, Mr. Woodard, name ten such oligarchs that control the South. You can't because they don't exist anymore. The South has an economy as modern as any other part of the country. And the proof is that Blacks have gone from being slaves to being consumers, just like the rest of us.

This process would have happened anyway, Civil War or no. So I disagree with Mr. Woodard's statement that the war was primarily about slavery. It was much more about culture, which included slavery but which didn't depend on it, especially in Virginia.

3. Morality Tale. The last two chapters of the book are the least satisfying, for that is where Mr. Woodard reveals his Yankee roots and moralizing tendencies. The Borderlanders are no longer just different, but they've morphed into something evil. Either that or they're stupid victims of some (non-existent) oligarchy. He claims, for example, that lessening regulations on clean air standards is a sop to corporations, apparently unaware that the United Mine Workers are as much against those regulations as their bosses. Of course, because their jobs and livelihoods are on the line.

Borderlanders have spent the last three centuries fighting against aristocracy and Yankee government  in defense of democracy and individual freedom. Why should they now surrender to the regulatory state? What is it about Yankee technocrats that makes them so fit to rule?

Some regulation is necessary. Too much regulation is bad. One can argue the distinction. But Mr. Woodard seems to think that every squiggle from a government bureaucrat is divinely inspired, and that Borderlanders should just suck it up and obey their Yankee superiors.

Though I enjoyed and recommend Mr. Woodard's book. Just don't believe all of it.

Further Reading:

• Why New York is Different
• The Dream 50 Years On
• Thomas Jefferson & Political Correctness