Go Buy Bye Bye

Reader alert: FPR editor Bill Kauffman’s latest is now available. Titled Bye Bye, Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map, it is vintage Kauffman. It also sports a splendid cover and carries a blurb from James Howard Kunstler. My blurb, had I been asked, would have been, “This is the book that will finally land Kauffman on the No-Fly List!” And with that, let me be the first to say hello to all the good folks at Homeland Security and the FBI who may be reading this. Glad to have you aboard.

In case the title isn’t sufficiently descriptive for you, the book is about America’s many secession movements — including movements to separate parts of states from other states, and movements to separate certain states from the Union. The individual portraits, the history lessons, the vocabulary enrichment — so many reasons to pick up the book. And you may be surprised at where Bill’s sympathies do and do not lie. In any case, the efforts he discusses are certainly worth trying to understand. They are full of people — honest-to-God patriots — worth taking seriously, and they make arguments worth considering.

We’ll have more coverage here at FPR as time marches on, including, I hope, an excerpt.