{"id":2117,"date":"2025-07-11T17:42:04","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T17:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/2117\/"},"modified":"2025-07-11T17:42:04","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T17:42:04","slug":"the-books-briefing-is-america-really-exceptional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/2117\/","title":{"rendered":"The Books Briefing: Is America Really Exceptional?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n

As a Soviet Jewish immigrant, the son of Reagan-loving anti-Communists, I grew up in a kind of secular religion: American exceptionalism. I was raised to believe that the evils of tyranny\u2014ones as mundane as toilet-paper lines or as horrific as the Holocaust\u2014could only have happened far away or long ago, in places without democracy or capitalism. Gradually, I became aware of arguments that the U.S. was exceptional in far less desirable ways, too: poorer health outcomes, higher murder rates, and greater inequality when compared with similarly prosperous nations. What I notice now, as a journalist working during the second Trump administration, is that for all the ways that America is unlike other nations, in crucial ways it is just like any other place: What happens anywhere\u2014including moves toward authoritarianism\u2014can also happen here. This idea underpins two recent essays in The Atlantic.<\/p>\n

First, here are four new articles from the Atlantic\u2019s Books section:<\/p>\n

In her immersive work of nonfiction, A Flower Traveled in My Blood, Haley Cohen Gilliland documents the decades-long struggle to recover children who, during Argentina\u2019s Dirty War, were snatched away from detained dissidents (many of whom were murdered) and given to supporters of the regime. In an <\/a>Atlantic <\/a>essay<\/a> about the book published this week, Julia M. Klein highlights Gilliland\u2019s insistence that this specific case bears cautionary lessons for many societies. Klein, who as a reporter witnessed Argentina\u2019s still-incomplete reckoning with its atrocities, finds that the U.S. \u201cgovernment\u2019s turn to sudden, legally questionable seizures\u201d of immigrants, \u201coften by unidentified masked men,\u201d reminds her of past abuses across South America. \u201cWhen tyrants threaten, more people and institutions may cower than resist,\u201d Klein writes, drawing on the experience of Argentines and others who saw state terror. \u201cThe loss of checks on state violence can be catastrophic; and no one knows who the next victim will be.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lessons in America, Am\u00e9rica, Greg Grandin\u2019s sweeping history of the Western Hemisphere after many of its nations gained independence from Europe\u2019s empires, are less ominous\u2014perhaps surprisingly so, considering the strongmen and civil wars that tend to dominate American media portrayals of those countries. \u201cAs some historians talk about Trump as a strongman in the Latin American mold, perhaps the region has something to teach us about democracy,\u201d Carolina A. Miranda wrote<\/a> a couple of weeks ago in an article about Grandin\u2019s book. Miranda noted that many democratic concepts, including birthright citizenship<\/a>, were pioneered in the region before spreading across the world. \u201cGrandin\u2019s narrative upends the idea of Latin America as perpetual victim,\u201d Miranda wrote\u2014along with the image of the U.S. as \u201ca forbearing parent\u201d shepherding its wayward southern neighbors. Instead, she suggested, Latin American constitutions and liberation movements have incubated principles that might help guide Americans.<\/p>\n

I might never let go entirely of the faith I grew up with, a core belief that the world has much to learn from the American example and from the freedoms Americans are promised. But I also believe we have much to learn\u2014and not just through cautionary tales. We may not have universal health care or ample high-speed rail like some of our wealthy peer nations, but over the past few decades I have seen these concepts seriously contemplated\u2014even, in some places, enacted\u2014by policy makers who look to other countries for ideas. These modest experiments have strengthened my belief that the U.S. is not exceptional in every way. Bad things that have happened elsewhere can happen here\u2014and so can changes that make life better.<\/p>\n

\"APhoto-illustration by Tarini Sharma<\/p>\n

Between \u2018the Drive to Forget and the Obligation to Remember\u2019<\/p>\n

By Julia M. Klein<\/p>\n

Argentina\u2019s unfinished reckoning shows how difficult it can be to recover from state terror.<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

What to Read<\/p>\n

A Visit From the Goon Squad<\/a>, by Jennifer Egan<\/p>\n

Egan\u2019s rightly lauded collection of linked stories found its way into my hands just as I was crawling out of a midlife mess in which I was making a lot of questionable choices. The book drops in on a highly populated world revolving around the music business, and for obvious reasons, I found myself drawn to the endearingly disastrous producer\u2019s assistant Sasha. Paradoxically, her story gave me a tremendous sense of hope that, regardless of my mistakes in the moment, everything would be okay in the end. We first meet her as a 20-something living in New York who steals a wallet while on a date. We see her teenage years as a runaway sex worker in Europe, watch her as a misanthropic college student, and ultimately glimpse her as a content and loving mother, living in California and channeling her love of music and curiosity into her children as well as artwork of her own. Sasha\u2019s life, like mine\u2014and like all of ours\u2014is full of low moments, but while those times shape us, they don\u2019t need to define us.\u00a0 \u2014 Xochitl Gonzalez<\/p>\n

From our list: Seven books for people figuring out their next move<\/a><\/p>\n

Out Next Week<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI<\/a>, by Karen Hao<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Empire of the Elite: Inside Cond\u00e9 Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America<\/a>, by Michael Grynbaum<\/a><\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Blowfish<\/a>, by Kyung-Ran Jo<\/a><\/p>\n

Your Weekend Read\"SeptemberKeystone Press \/ Alamy<\/p>\n

She Was More Than the Next Marilyn Monroe<\/p>\n

By Mayukh Sen<\/p>\n

Taken at face value, Mansfield\u2019s life might seem like the tragedy of a woman who struggled to break away from her reputation. The recently released HBO documentary My Mom Jayne<\/a>, directed by her youngest daughter, the actor Mariska Hargitay\u2014who was 3 when her mother died and would become a household name as the hard-boiled Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit\u2014invites viewers to reconsider that framing. Although the film acknowledges the injustice of Mansfield\u2019s unfulfilled artistic potential, it also dignifies Mansfield as both actor and mother. The result is an affectionate tribute to a woman often impugned as Monroe\u2019s dime-store variant; it also doubles as a portrait of Hollywood\u2019s studio system in a state of free fall. Mansfield was a shrewd navigator of the industry\u2019s politics\u2014until they changed so drastically that she could not keep pace with them.<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Sign up for The Wonder Reader,<\/a> a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.<\/p>\n

Explore all of our newsletters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-2117","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}