The Underdog Charge

Henry Goodstone opens on Nauru, a country that mined itself to a moonscape and spent the windfall on a musical, against Iceland, which jailed the bankers who wrecked it because on a small island the banker stands in the same supermarket queue. Across twenty countries and twenty domains, from Finland's happiness to Jamaica's sprinters, he argues that small nations win because their institutions are too small to hide failure from the people who bear it. America, once the underdog, has become the Soviet team in the story: dominant, insulated, and no longer feeling the charge. The single variable is distance, and the book asks the reader to find where it has grown long in their own life, and close it.