NetGalley Review: House on Fire by David N. Cicilline

House on Fire by David N. Cicilline

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Rating:   ✩✩✩✩✩

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I was very interested to read this book by home state Representative Cicilline because he has always been a politician I admired.  While I live out of his district (in the other one, because we have two, and that's it!) I always found his work for RI to be informed by compassion, thorough research and a drive to make politics work for everyone.  As a result I was excited to see his perspective on how the GOP arrived at Trump and the associated violence.  However, the book was about much more than that in ways both good and not so good.

This book wound up being more autobiographical than the blurb would indicate.   While the personal narrative does serve Cicilline’s thesis that the GOP has been on a long road to today’s level of extremism, that message can get lost in the storytelling.   That said, as an outsider to RI (a transplant from Upstate NY, which might as well be Neptune to native RIers) I found learning RIs political history to be interesting and informative.  As a book about the Representative, this is a five-star read that provides great insights into the recent history of northeastern-style blue state politics.  

As a treatise on how the GOP tracked into extremism (a thread that can be traced back to at least Nixon, if not all the way back to the turn of the 20th century) the book is instructive, but maybe not revolutionary.  The direct calling out of GOP politicians (and the Democrats that enable them through “pick-me” politeness and bipartisanship) and the evaluation of a GOP playbook ripped right off from Evangelical Christianity, seems spot on.  However, I would have loved to see that analysis go a bit deeper and as a result the plan to fix these issues could have been much more thorough.  To say something that may get me labeled as an elitist, this is a good primer text for moderate Democrats who have been thus far insulated enough by their privilege to only just now realize that there is violent, radical extremism in our midst.  

Altogether, this one still makes it on to my “Pre-2024 Election Reading List” that I will be suggesting to anyone and everyone who wants to try and turn the tide.  

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Published by: Twelve Books Release Date: 30 August 2022