The book is a well written and enjoyable account of the US Presidential election written by someone watching from the outside. It's essentially a blow by blow diary of someone watching the election unfold through the media.

For me the election was a bit too soon to merit reading an account which had no insider accounts and no behind the scenes analysis. It is a decent read and would be a good recap for someone who hadn't followed the election or in a few years when wondering how did Trump happen. For me however, the insider accounts are much more interesting and insightful and this book suffers from being written at a distance.

Review added to goodreads

If you’re looking for detailed analysis of the 2016 US presidential contest then Howard Harrison’s ‘The Great Divide’ is not the book for you. It was written as events unfolded, rather than with the benefit of hindsight and offers a readable narrative of events in a conversational style punctuated with cracker-barrel ‘philosophising’ that you’ll either find charming or grating.

I must confess that I belong in the latter camp, as a result of ‘sentences’ such as “Yeah, right” and remarks such as “Not to get too deep on you – I am a child of the ‘60s – but we really are all in this together, folks”.

Harrison makes no secret of the fact that he is a lifelong Democrat but writes that such is his party’s aversion to Republicans’ political views that “to most of us it didn’t matter if our candidate was Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Colonel Sanders”, which seems a bizarre statement given the strength of feeling excited by the race for the Democrat presidential nomination and the impact that may have had on the presidential contest.

So if you want (or should that be ‘if you can bear’?) to relive the US political headlines of 2016, then this book will serve that purpose. Your memory will be refreshed but it’s extremely doubtful that your mind will otherwise have been stretched.