Okay, but like, how do you rate an exhaustive investigation into the rot at the root of the American project. Vital, necessary, illuminating, gives name to things I already knew, Wilkerson's work is excruciating and provides much needed language and context for the way that racism operates and the work that it does in the US. Her comprehensive analysis of the similarities between Nazi Germany and White America should be required reading. And while the book has far fewer narratives of lynchings than it could have included, her frank insistence that we - that is the non-Black we - encounter what being Black in the US was (is) like is critical, especially for those of us who did not cover this in detail in history classes. (Or who learned about one or two, but they were presented as singular events rather than nearly daily occurrences.)