Now that Goodreads encourages us to start our reviews as soon as we "shelve" them (a good thing when a book is this enormous) I just wanted to get in there early to say that I read the beginning twice rather than rush ahead because it was so amazing.

Don't know much about history, but I know what I like. I liked learning about Malcolm X's parents, about how abortion became political, why American history conventionally starts in 1492, that Bobby Kennedy was an aide to Joe McCarthy, that the English were trying to be nice to the natives in comparison with the Spanish, , that the secret ballot was a key method of suppressing the Black vote, that George Washington had a slave who left to fight for the British, that the British laughed at American philosophies of freedom when they were the big slave owners, indeed how keeping the South in the union was behind so many constitutional decisions. I could go on.

Goodreads thinks I read it three times but it merely took as long as three books and I don't know much about how to edit my reading history.