Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an excellently-researched, well-written, and very enjoyable book. From its guiding thesis through the precise execution, Radwell's first work (hopefully of many more) is one of those rare treasures that will bring you greater understanding without the polarizing anger that modern sociopolitical works usually hope to stoke with their thinly-veiled partisan agenda. In its opening chapters, Radwell explains that he set out to write American Schism to himself more precisely understand the roots of the extreme polarity and partisanship of modern American political, social, and philosophical views - and across the book's 400 pages, he certainly achieved this understanding for me. It's not entirely surprising that the sociopolitical ideas largely born (or resurrected) in the Enlightenment form the foundation of current social tensions - on some level, I think we'd all suspect this. But instead of idly speculating with backwards-looking thought, Radwell expertly dissects and traces forward precisely what Enlightenment concepts and "thought leaders" inspired further generations of thinkers, who in turn built schools of theory around the range of principles on which our current society is built. Put simply, Radwell lays out what's happened in Western political thought in the past 300 years and how it's led to the arguments we're all having today. It's really a dive back into what we all learned in high school history, contextualized with the urgent present-day realities that remind us why learning history is so important - and critically, presented with an eye towards explanation rather than judgment. I don't care who I'm supposed to love or hate - I care about what ideas led to our current state of affairs. That's a question that Radwell very cleanly answers in American Schism. I highly recommend the read.