Rather than a nation split cleanly into ideological absolutes, America is a country made up of individual citizens first, all of whom constitute a mixture within themselves when it comes to today’s most divisive topics. No one, then, is all conservative or all liberal, but a combination of the two. In A Marbled People, A Marbled Nation, the author explores this condition through an honest portraiture of his own views, from the United Nations to oil dependence to health care to Iraq to many others. Liberal on some counts, conservative on others, the blending represents the national patch-work as a whole and exposes the useful but ultimately limited red and blue model for the largely harmful outlay it has become. Rather than just opinion pieces, however, the book’s essays offer solutions to many of the nation’s most pressing rifts. While individual readers will find here both agreement and disagreement, these solutions should at least provoke thought, the most useful and powerful tool in a free, active society.