Already one of the more talked-about literary events of this year, Cullen Murphy’s book bracingly takes on the question that Americans have been anxiously asking for generations, with increasing urgency of late: Will the American Empire suffer the fate of the Roman Empire? And what does that mean? Eschewing facile comparisons and obvious analogies, Murphy mines history and current events in original ways to create jarring equivalencies between Rome and America, yielding penetrating insights. Is the American Empire fated to decline like Rome? Probably so, at least in some sense. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. “Like Rome,” Murphy writes, “America is in some ways inextinguishable. What we can’t know is which characteristics will be extinguished and which won’t. But we do have a say in the outcome.” Murphy, who for twenty years was The Atlantic’s managing editor, takes us on a brisk and entertaining tour of both Rome in the third century BCE and America at the dawn of the 21st century. This book is both fun and important: America’s future course depends in part on whether we can learn from Rome’s mistakes.