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The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself
Nick Bryant, Bloomsbury, £25
IF you select “virtually any date in US history, it would be possible to find the same poisonous ingredients [that] percolated violently to the surface on January 6, 2021,” writes journalist and historian Nick Bryant in his new book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
Donald Trump, and the movement behind him, is both new and old; times are unprecedented but also, to historians of the US, frighteningly familiar. Bryant, a historian by training, meticulously makes sense of these contradictions, methodically unpicking the mythology of US history to clearly argue that Trump — and his support — is the product of that history.
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