How to Hide an Empire
by Daniel Immerwahr
First reviewed June 2019
This was the last book review I posted before I started this website! I am appreciative that it has surpassed drunk tank pink as my most “like-button” liked review on goodreads. That thrills me, because it was mostly the small handful of one-star reviews (less than 2% of the books I’ve reviewed!) that got a lot of likes. I can definitely understand that siren song that is dunking on lame stuff, but not my business model. And I loved How to Hide an Empire. And I really like this review. It was a grace note to end on.
I still don’t know much about Guam. Anyway, here it is, my most popular goodreads review.
This has a Sesame Street vibe. Wait, stop, you know I don’t mean that as a pejorative so don’t scrunch up your face quite yet. See, if you come into How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States without a lot of prior knowledge, it’s super engrossing. Like when you are a kid watching Sesame Street, capisce? You’re extremely entertained by Cookie Monster and then it’s over and you sit up and say, “Oh snap, I know how to count now!” Just swap Cookie Monster for Northern Marianas OSHA loopholes and a toddler’s youthful curiosity with my poor historical understanding of U.S. geopolitical imperialism.
This is kids’ stuff, as in we should really teach this stuff to kids. I knew precisely zero percent of it. There is a one-hundred percent chance I went into this book being able to name more Pokémon than past or present U.S. territories. I mean, sure, there are functionally hundreds more Pokémon, but I’m talking percentages here. Even ten percent of Pokemon are like, eighty. Eighty Pokémon rattling around in my head before I realized Puerto Rico—the only territory-status-location I knew beforehand because of the NYC Diaspora—had a friend named Guam.
Speaking of Guam, I still know almost nothing about Guam, the mystery island of the book. I would have liked to hear more about Guam. Tell me more about Guam, book. Add a Guam chapter please. Guamanians are fellow American citizens, which, again, is something I learned way after it was embarrassing. Post-embarrassment. Wrapped back around to where I'm okay writing a paragraph about my ignorance. Can we get Guam and Puerto Rico in as states during my lifetime, please?
One of the blurbs on the back or the flap calls the book “conversational” and I assumed that was lit-press nonsense: how can you can take a dense or academic subject matter and make it conversational when “conversational” in non-fiction almost exclusively applies to those fly-on-the-wall stories loosely cobbled together from emails and interviews and eventually turned into an HBO miniseries? But it was apt. It was apt! I’m really surprised by how approachable the text is, which is honestly....great. I spend most of my reviews deriding simplicity for its inherent tedium, but I’m here to learn, dude. Make it clear.
And this book did! Grandiloquent phrasing would be so much chaff to pull apart. Things are conversational, easy. It even made me actually laugh out loud a few times:
Standards—the protocols by which objects and processes are coordinated—are admittedly one of the most stultifying topics known to humankind. A sample of headlines from the journal Industrial Standardization gives a sense of the exquisite heights to which boredom can be taken:
Industry Approves Recommended List of Paper Sizes
New Law Requires Labels for Wool
Brochure Tells About Building Coordination
Revision of List of Recommended Paper Sizes
A callback gets laughs from me, any time. An internal callback about paper sizes? Flawless.
And there’s nuance beyond internal allusion—the fancy way to say callback, I believe—in the writing, too. Example: Before you even crack the spine, you can tell you’re getting a work in the vein of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, because the subtitle is A History of the Greater United States, not The History of the Greater United States, even though it is the only history of the territories of the United States non-scholars are going to scoop up this summer.
So if you’re trying to decide whether to read this book, the answer is definitely yes do it. If you want a direct thesis sentence to help you, here it is:
[G]lobalization, in turn, depended on key technologies devised or perfected by the U.S. military during the Second World War. These were, like synthetics, empire-killing technologies, in that they helped render colonies unnecessary. They did so by making movement easier without direct territorial control.
That’s pretty much it. I can’t summarize how we got here, because that’s the book’s job, dude. Go read it. It's fun (and also horrifying). You'll learn things (horrifying things). What else is there?
Oh, and Empire is one of the only books of recent vintage that my dad and I picked up independently and simultaneously, though he likely came to it a Mr. Hooper to my Ernie. Which is to say that I, the neophyte and he, the seasoned vet, both found it worth reading. With appeal that wide, then even a Grouch like you might like it.