Gavin (The United Kingdom)’s review of France on the Brink: A Great Civilization in the New Century | Goodreads

2/5: Too recent to be history, too old and event-specific to be cultural criticism, too politics-focused to be deep. "Too detailed" is a good fault to have - but the endless parade of names and quirks and mistresses anchor it too much to the 90s and 00s. Still, it's a quick way to understand the roots of more recent French politics. The central thesis - that France was finally losing its distinctiveness, that a hundred years of industrial policy / statism is finally starting to crack, that they're struggling unusually with multiculturalism - seems true. (France is now 10% foreign-born, compare...

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