Kindle. The first two paragraphs Michiko Kakutani's review sold it to me as having a rich conceit: that the United States has a second Civil War. I've thought for a long time that the U.S. Federal Government is too powerful for anyone to challenge, but the divisiveness of the recent election struck me as a plausible mechanism for El Akkad's premise to come to pass. Unfortunately he opts for a retread of the actual Civil War, pitching South against North once more, rather than mining the city/country schism suggested by current-day Trumpistan.
The book squanders its promise with too much detail (irrelevant to this story, and better treated in factual accounts) and an eye-for-an-eye causal determinism where everything is justified by completely unimaginative conjoined events (cf Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist). The tight linear structure and somewhat formulaic, exacting prose made me think that El Akkad was a computer programmer, but the author's bio states he is in fact a journalist.
Concretely we get accounts of life in a container in Louisiana (familiar to fly-in-fly-out mining employees), climate change (look outside), a refugee camp (see the newspaper on Manus Island and Nauru, and sundry Vietnamese accounts), the full Gitmo experience (see Michael Mori's book etc.), child soldiers, a Quiet Egyptian (see Graham Greene), a love-it-or-leave vibe, a mixed martial arts non-novelty, mindless capricious drones (newspaper), and an uninsightful take on Southern culture (see Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full for a better effort). OK, we're yet to see biological agents kill millions of people. Sarat is the great woman in history, and pivot around her the country does, her being an otherwise empty vessel with no stake in creation. The interstitial faked news is a move lifted from John Brunner.
Reading Kakutani's review to its end just now: she is right that the morality does not escape the Star Wars universe. Justin Cronin took a second bite for the New York Times. Both act like they've never heard or thought about any of this stuff before.