I am very glad this book was made: it serves a certain purpose. However, we need sophisticated social scientists studying secessionism from a sympathetic perspective. See my other reviews of books on secessionism that deal with the issue from an empirical, comparative perspective.
A large portion of this collection of essays, as you might expect, examines the pre-eminent example of secession in American history, the Confederacy. The three essays dealing with this period -- Joseph Stromberg's "Republicanism, Federalism, and Secession in the South, 1790-1865;" Thomas DiLorenzo's "Yankee Confederates: New England Secession Movements Prior to the War Between the States;" and James Ostrowski's "Was the Union Army's Invasion of the Confederate States a Lawful Act? An Analysis of President Lincoln's Legal Arguments Against Secession" -- form the core of the book. However, this title is more than just an apologetic for the South. Philosophical, legal, and political analyses by other contributors provide a solid framework for secession as a political theory in our era as well.
The last essay, Bruce Benson's look at arbitration as an alternative to state-run judicial systems in commerce and trade, provides a true-life example of a type of modern individual "secession," and recalls Mises' suggestion (quoted by several contributors) that the right to secession can ultimately be carried down to the community, home, and even individual level. Murray Rothbard reinforces this idea in "Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State."
This is a very important and valuable book, challenging as it does the accepted, post-1865 wisdom of Constitutional interpretation. Secession didn't die at Appomattox, either as a political theory or as a right inherent to each state in the American union. As several of the contributors note, secession (and the threat of it) is the single most powerful check on the expansion of federal power -- which, of course, explains why, from Lincoln on down, so many people have worked so feverishly to discredit it. But truth is just truth, and no matter how hard the "enlightened" classes try to deny it, analyses like the ones in this collection show that a true idea cannot be silenced forever.