Charlottesville: An American Story
Comprehensively demonstrates how internet hatemongering and gun ubiquity are endangering pluralism, civic participation and good-faith debate ... Given the demands on our attention in the Trump era, not all readers will want to revisit Charlottesville. But, as described by Baker, the events couldn’t be timelier.
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Historical context combines with a vivid narrative of the 2017 demonstrations to give readers a better understanding of the combustible atmosphere that converged on Charlottesville ... Comprehensive ... Baker’s writing style delivers an on-the-ground feel of what it was like in Charlottesville, including a harrowing account of the night torch-wielding white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia’s campus.
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Baker’s vividly detailed reconstruction is a worthwhile addition to a growing canon of narrative nonfiction aimed at documenting and interpreting the outburst of race- and hate-driven violence in America between 2015 (the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C.) and 2020 (the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis) ... Baker...devotes much of this book to portraiture of the combatants—arguably too many—but acknowledges being better able to stomach the counterprotesters ... I hoped to learn more about the white nationalist bottom feeders and their alliances, rivalries and tactics, perhaps because they no longer operate on the fringe of our politics ... Yet Baker’s understanding necessarily goes only so far, as she chose not to interview or delve deeper into the devolutions of Spencer, Jason Kessler or many of their ilk, fearful that they might somehow lead her astray ... She builds anticipation toward that weekend, and her depictions of bloody beatings and the car attack can be bone chilling. But the drama is drained by what starts to read like military history in its stenography of troop movements and actions, gleaned from video and photographs.
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