El Casino Macabre 
James Morone
- Wall Street: A Cultural History by Steve Fraser Buy this book
- Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors by Charles S. Maier Buy this book
Many Americans celebrate national holidays by mobbing megastores at dawn, pushing aside the slow-footed and grabbing the $39 computers, while TV crews film the spectacle and warn the indolent that they’d ‘better get down here before it’s all gone’. The image of shoppers sending one another to hospital catches the spirit of these two books. Both address the question of the moment: has the American republic turned into an empire? And if so, should we cheer, lament or simply get on with imperial business?
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
From the LRB letters page: [ 19 July 2007 ] Bill Tilles.
James Morone is a professor of politics at Brown University and the author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. His next book will be George Washington’s Revenge.
print layout
tell a friend