Chosen Country

The only reason I'm giving this as high a rating as I am is, as a Utah native and someone who has always felt disillusionment with my homestate precisely because my family and I do not have the access and racial power that many of the folks involved in this situation have/had, I found the conversation in this book about the LDS church useful; reflecting the realities I have lived while challenging my perspectives by situating the LDS church's relationship to land in the more rural parts of the state (where I have always lived closer to Salt Lake City proper), and placing the Bundy's and their movement in that conversation. 
Despite that, I felt Pogue made mistakes in the organization and flow of this. 

• The timelines are jumbled, both political/historical timelines as well as Pogue's personal timeline.
• Pogue's consistent asides about his own emotional history, while humanizing, always felt placed in the middle of the action in such a way that I felt that it disrupted the flow of what was happening.
• Pogue's ruminations on the socio-political positioning of the Bundyite movement alongside leftist concerns felt... underresearched and underexplained. I understand Pogue is not an expert in that field, but I found myself wishing that Pogue had looked a little closer into some history of the region, especially that of Indigenous activism, before making the claims he did. 
• In fact, on that note, for all the handwringing Pogue does about the racial tribalism and white supremacist-adjacent politics happening, I felt he truly failed to place this movement in relation to Indigenous livelihoods (especially in rural Utah; like, just a huge community/history to completely leave out of the conversation about public land usage) and politics, especially the LandBack movement. I'm not saying Chosen Country should have been about that; I am saying Pogue's consistent linguistic usage of “Indian” and complete silence on the LDS church's historical relationship to the Ute, Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone nations felt to me like I was reading half a book, truthfully. I could go on. 
• In general, I felt the racial aspect of this was not explored in the depth it deserved- we heard about it constantly, worried about it in the prose, but never really got into it, and it shows some weaknesses in Pogue's political imagination.