How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
Published 2019 · 513 pages · 141,075 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · History, Politics & Society, Nonfiction
How hard is How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States to read?
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States scores 32 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Immerwahr writes in clear, conversational popular-history prose with only occasional legal and political terms. It is closer to Atomic Habits in accessibility than to scholarly monographs.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Sentences are short to medium and direct, with wry asides rather than nested clauses. The prose is easy to follow at speed.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The argument rests on concrete episodes, such as guano islands, Philippine schools, and Pacific bases, rather than theory. The idea of a hidden empire stays tied to places and people.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- The book covers over a century of events across many territories, with plenty of dates, legal cases and statistics. Short chapters keep the load manageable, yet new facts arrive on nearly every page.
How How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States is regarded
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States holds a literary regard score of 52 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.