Title: Divided
Author: Tim Marshall
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count: 266
Rating: 4/5
This book was sent to me as a review copy at some point last year and it’s just been sitting on my shelves ever since. It’s not that I didn’t want to read it, though. I just had to be in the right mood, and I think I finally achieved that mood through a combination of a general election here in the UK and some of the conversations I’ve been having with my girlfriend about the state of the world in general.
Marshall does a fantastic job at taking a look at why we build walls in the first place, and he manages to make global politics understandable even to a layman by focussing on one thing at a time. For example, we start out with a chapter on China that compares the Great Wall of China to the great firewall, and then we move on to America, the Middle East, Europe and the like.
The crazy thing is that even writing only about walls between countries, there’s so much more that Marshall could have written about, and you get the feeling that no book on this subject could ever be complete. On top of that, even though it was first published in 2018, it’s already a little out of date in places, because human beings are terrible and we keep on building more and more walls. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, and I think Marshall was fairly impartial when it comes to the way he wrote. Yeah!
