In fact, he evokes lots of essayistic questions such as: “But where do we draw the line between colony and not-a-colony? If the Danish West Indies were a colony on March 16, 1917, what about the U.S. However, Mack avoids taking a political stance in Not-Quite. It would be so easy and self-serving for an author to go off on a political tangent, à la Dennis Miller, at this point. “For Americans, it’s easy to think of colonialism in these history-book terms, misdeeds carried out by other people in exotic places,” Mack writes, raising the question later, “What does a colony even look like in the 21st century?” But what would we say if more news shed light on the four million people who inhabit the little islands the US has usurped (usually for military purposes)? What would we say if our state and college-board-approved history books revealed the less-than-glittering reality of our bravado or arrogance? Movies, literature, even news events such as Russia’s recent encroachment on Ukraine perpetuate America’s supposed superiority by encouraging citizens to take a stance against such actions. Something we’re implicitly taught in grade school and through college is what a nasty word it is, a distasteful practice done by less enlightened empires, not by the USA, the shining example of democracy. It makes for a read you can’t put down and can’t quit rolling around in your mind afterward. In The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA, Mack goes to the five American colonies, shedding stark light on the politics and history of the mainland. So we might expect him to whisk us away from what we already (think we) know and take us to fantastic far-away lands, but he’s not your average travel writer. He’s also written for National Geographic Traveler and Travel + Leisure. His first book, Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day, paid homage to the old travel series title, Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. Places like American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
You know, those places we gloss over in the scroll-down menu when filling out address forms on websites. It started on a Sunday morning when Doug Mack and his wife were sifting through laundry day quarters, and soon it lured him thirty-one thousand miles across the Pacific and Atlantic in search of the America no one talks about: colonies.
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