![]() ![]() ![]() Spanning centuries and millennia, drawing on archaeological digs to evidence from Berlin and Hollywood, David Frye uncovers the story of walls and asks questions that are both intriguing and profound. And yet they rarely appear in our history books. Years before Donald Trump pointed out the utility of border barriers, governments around the world and private landowners (especially in “sanctuary cities”) had already embarked on a new spate of wall-building to keep out terrorists, immigrants, and criminals. They have accompanied the rise of cities, nations, and empires. (The first ran from prehistory up to the proliferation of cannons in the 1400s.) In a brilliant epilogue entitled “Love Your Neighbor, But Don’t Pull Down Your Hedges,” Frye points out that, ironically, shortly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall made anti-wall triumphalism the unchallenged conventional wisdom, the world quietly entered its Second Age of Walls. One of the most fashionable manifestations of Trump derangement syndrome-the assumption that Walls Never Work-is crushingly debunked in historian n David Frye’s eye-opening history of 4,000 years of barrier-building, from the Fertile Crescent to the Malibu Colony, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine: ![]()
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