It's the best syllabus you will read this year.

The book is a collection of essays on the subject of bigotry, looking to define the concept and understand its function.

The author passes the pint test. It is well-written, with a lot of personality to it that works well within the context of the subject in the author's own stories informing what is going on. It has a conversational tone that does not look to offer a sort of scientific or sociological understanding of bigotry as opposed to an architecture of its operation in everyday life.

Clearly in conversation with books like On Tyranny it shares that conversation with books like Conflict is not Abuse. While on the side of the angels as a whole, the author wants to question orthodoxies about bigotry, not treating it as something possessed of one ideology or faction.

Like in any collection, there are stronger and weaker bits. The best parts are first three parts of the book, particularly the second and third. Here the author is exploring not novel, but practical ways to think about what is going on in bigotry. The last part is the weakest, or is much more uneven in quality between the chapters. Some of them did not lose the thread so much as had none, being more a collection of ideas and quotations that are good, but not building to the thesis stated in the chapter heading at all.

As stated in the text, the author is in curriculum studies, and it shows. There is some damning with faint praise to this, but only some. It is, in part, an audience problem. Any time you have repeated invocations of a dictionary definition to start off a chapter's investigation of a concept, you are going to loose me a little. But if it is not something that is a more sociological study of bigotry, (which was not what I expected the book to be, but something that I did want to read after the fact), it would be an excellent framework for that.

Like I would teach this class. Or host this discussion group. The premise of each chapter is a subject worth discussing and using to teach people about society, complete with detailed if somewhat showy citations, that would lead to good places, especially in a younger(-ish) audience. It is not that the book does not answer the call to action in its title, but I think that the real accomplishment would be in building out of that and figuring out how the concepts here match to your own lived experience and world. Which, again, not the strict purpose of the book but neither is it one that it is antagonistic to.

My thanks to the author, Nicholas Ensley Mitchell, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic, for making the ARC available to me.

If you like books which have a great structure that emphasises their themes in an ideal way and unfolds the argument in a good flow, On Bigotry is one of the best books you can read on bigotry.
With eye-opening examples, and a rich discussion, the writer promotes morality, human rights and peace.
Best of all, the book provides practical solutions.