In Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy, political theorist Heather Pool offers a theory of “political mourning” in which publics respond to a highly visible death (or deaths) in ways that challenge the existing meaning of citizenship and the nation's responsibilities towards disenfranchised groups. In the introduction, Pool states, “I define political mourning as an affective communal response to a loss that threatens (or is perceived to threaten) the historical narrative, present expression, or future possibility of the political community and/or the ideals that sustain that political community” (17). While political mourning could be associated with any identity group in the United States, Pool specifically examines the role of racial identity formation. In addition to centering racial identity in the political mourning concept, Pool narrows the focus of her work to the deaths of “everyday people” rather than public figures such as politicians or martyred activists.This book contributes to political theory by building upon past scholarship on mourning and trauma studies. In the introduction, Pool argues, “It is the central claim of this book that the deaths of everyday citizens, at particular moments and in the wake of a contingent process by which these deaths are made political, can move the living to political action” (10). Pool then delineates between three forms of “mourning” in chapter one, including “private mourning,” “public mourning,” and “political mourning” (14–21). The conception of “political mourning” draws from John Dewey's publics and the “barriers to creative democracy.” These barriers—“apathy”, “indirect effects”, “the problem of presentation,” and “development of judgment” (19)—provide the framework in the analysis chapters of Political Mourning. Pool states, “Considering Dewey's focus on mobilizing citizens out of apathy, widely visible losses that prompt discussions of responsibility can be seen as moments when publics are formed. In response to visible losses, citizens and political leaders often propose specific institutional reforms” (20). Additionally, Pool extends theories regarding death and politics, including works by Bonnie Honig, Judith Butler's “mortalist humanism” concept, and Simon Stow's book, American Mourning (21–22). The author traces the political process of “how mourning becomes political by examining several instances where death served as the justification for political calls for change” (33, original emphasis). In Pool's “processual theory of political mourning,” scholars should consider five aspects of a highly publicized death, including: “context”; “visibility”; “agents”; “responsibility”; and “political change” (7–8).The analysis chapters include the following four examples of political mourning in the United States: The Triangle Fire of 1911; the murder of Emmett Till; the September 11 attacks; and the Black Lives Matter movement. Chapter two examines the political mourning surrounding the Triangle Fire, which involved the deaths of 146 young women and girls who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This chapter critiques the ways in which white racial identity transformed, in part, due to the mourning process and memorials in honor of deceased workers who were mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Prior to the Triangle Fire, “white identity” was reserved almost exclusively for Anglo-Saxons (47). When workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory held a labor strike less than two years before the fire, although “non-white” workers received a lot of press coverage, their efforts to unionize failed. According to Pool, the political mourning following the fire motivated the public to support increased worker protections. Pool states, “Before the fire, the immigrant, not-quite-white striking workers were perceived by political elites as attacking American values and cherished ideals of self-sufficiency at the heart of American identity. . . . However, the power and the outpouring of public sympathy after the fire recast the now-dead workers as victims of politically enabled negligence and racialized exclusion” (49). Additionally, she claims that the dead workers’ “youth, femaleness, and ambiguous racial status” transformed them into sympathetic figures in the public's imagination (49). Although factory fires were common during this period, Pool argues that the earlier news coverage of the Triangle Factory workers’ strike created a “visibility” that made the public “predisposed to care about the workers in this factory” after the fire (56–57, original emphasis). Pool claims that the widespread mourning in New York City following the Triangle Fire, including a “March of Mourning” with nearly 400,000 marchers and onlookers, mobilized the public to care for “non-white” laborers (59) and adjusted the public's understanding of non-Anglo-Saxon “whiteness.” Pool claims, “Triangle was a moment when intra-white racial differences were muted, and one of many moments in the long process of reconceptualizing the threat to Americanness as originating not from hordes of immigrants but from blackness” (66). The public began to view the mostly Italian and Jewish victims of the Triangle Fire in New York as “innocent victims,” and their victimhood and status as working-class immigrants “laid the groundwork for a shift from hostile race relations toward friendly ethnic rivalries that helped pave the way to full citizenship for white workers within a racialized democracy” (67).Chapter three explores the political mourning surrounding the murder of Emmett Till. Pool provides a detailed overview of the scene of the murder in Mississippi, the funeral procession in Chicago, and the deep South location for the trial of Till's killers. In this chapter, Pool discusses the primary agent of this political mourning, Emmett's mother Mamie Till-Bradley (more commonly known as Mamie Till-Mobley). Pool argues that Till-Bradley's claim “I know the whole United States is mourning with me” was, in Pool's words, “a powerful rhetorical construction,” that extended a mother's private mourning of her son to a collective mourning for Americans of all races (80–81). Additionally, the author connects the death of Emmett Till and the subsequent failure of the Mississippi court to convict his two murders to sociopolitical contexts, including the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. Pool claims that the unjust verdict of “not guilty” for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam (who later confessed to Till's murder) helped propel political change by getting Northern liberal whites to recognize the extreme harms of white supremacy. She states, “A politics of mourning over Till's death gave white American liberals—who had apparently come to accept the Jim Crow status quo—a clear instance to reflect on the calls of the nascent civil rights movement for racial justice and to see how the reality of Jim Crow violated aspirations to actual American democracy” (72–73). Similar to the author's finding in the chapter on the Triangle Fire, some white Americans became motivated to see a racialized community differently once a tragic death received widespread media coverage. This chapter of Political Mourning provides one of the most insightful applications of the political mourning concept that rhetorical critics could use with other civil rights case studies. As Pool states, “Without understanding the politics of mourning, it is difficult to make sense of why some deaths lead to political change while others do not” (90).In chapter four, Pool argues that the United States adopted a skewed version of political mourning following the September 11 terrorist attacks, what she terms “sovereign mourning.” In contrast to the other cases, the author claims that, following 9/11, the American government did not take any responsibility for the events that could have motivated the terrorists, including US military interventions and political intrusions in the Middle East. Furthermore, the news coverage of 9/11 focused on images of planes flying into the Twin Towers and burning images of the Pentagon rather than bodies of the deceased. In the analysis chapters on the Triangle Fire, Emmett Till, and Black Lives Matter, there are detailed descriptions of how images of the dead served pivotal roles in rallying the public toward political change. And finally, the majority of the victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers were white Americans, primarily upper-class white men in the financial industry. These victims were honored along with the New York City firefighters and police officers who responded to the attack on the Twin Towers. Meanwhile, the racialized groups of Middle Easterners, Muslims, and Arabs were constructed as an “Arab Muslim enemy” that could fill the country's need for an external target following the end of the Cold War (97–99). Pool, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers first-hand, provided a compelling description of the context preceding 9/11. This chapter departs in some ways from Pool's theorization of political mourning. It may have been beneficial for readers to learn more about how the patriotism following 9/11 helped draw white racial groups together, compared to other racial groups.Finally, chapter five centers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the impact of Trayvon Martin's and Mike Brown's deaths. Pool states that while many social media users adopted the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter to push for political change regarding police brutality, the alternative #AllLivesMatter became a backlash against centering blackness. As the author argues, “If, as the data seem to indicate, those using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter are generally white and pro-law-enforcement, #AllLivesMatter seeks to equalize the risk of being a police officer with being a black citizen. . . . It also disregards the long history of law enforcement's purpose: to protect both property and whiteness” (139). It is important to note that both Martin and Brown were killed by individuals who were white-appearing and serving in roles to protect the state. Since Political Mourning was published in 2021 and completed in the spring of 2020, there are only brief mentions of George Floyd's death by strangulation. However, in the case of George Zimmerman (who killed Martin) and Officer Darren Wilson (who shot Brown during a traffic stop), neither of the killers were convicted of a crime. Chapter five instructively synthesizes past studies on the forms of dialogue that social media users engaged in with either hashtag. As the BLM movement is ongoing, Heather Pool's connection of the political mourning concept to this activism could help scholars studying other deaths that have been commemorated by BLM. Pool claims, “The public whose interests the state reflects and whose interactions become predictably ‘canalized’ is a white public, who has rejected both logical and emotive calls to recognize the humanity of blacks and other people of color in the United States. And yet blacks (and other excluded groups) regularly challenge the undemocratic institutional arrangements that define our white democracy” (143, original emphasis).Pool concludes by considering the outcomes of political mourning, whether it will “serve as a powerful resource to demand Deweyan democracy” or “lead the polity down dark roads of xenophobia and the denial of our own role in shaping the world” (153). These two possibilities are reflected in the four case studies. While “political mourning” could help scholars studying public memory, affect, rhetorical history, media theory, and publicity surrounding deaths and tragedies, the concept may be too broad, or stretched to its limits, aligning the aftermath of murders with the aftermath of terrorism and deadly fires.