Book Beginnings: How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter

maphead

Jun 23

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday . While I'm no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I'm back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply "share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight."

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Adam Fox flipped over the carpet and opened the trapdoor that led to the basement of the Vac Shack Vacuums shop, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The thirty-seven-year-old had been living underneath the shop with his two dogs after his girlfriend had kicked him out.

Last week I featured Chris Bohjalian's 2012 historical novel The Sandcastle Girls. The week before it was Barbara Ward's 1959 Five Ideas That Change the World. This week it's Barbara F. Walter's 2022 How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.

When political scientist Barbara F. Walter began making the rounds on a number of my favorite political podcasts I knew it was simply a matter of time before I read her book. In a major stroke of good luck I stumbled across a copy at my small town public library and decided to give it a chance. Here's what Amazon has to say about How Civil Wars Start.

Political violence rips apart several towns in southwest Texas. A far-right militia plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for treason. An armed mob of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists storms the U.S. Capitol. Are these isolated incidents? Or is this the start of something bigger? Barbara F. Walter has spent her career studying civil conflict in places like Iraq, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka, but now she has become increasingly worried about her own country.

Perhaps surprisingly, both autocracies and healthy democracies are largely immune from civil war; it's the countries in the middle ground that are most vulnerable. And this is where more and more countries, including the United States, are finding themselves today.