As for the results? In the election of 2012, Barack Obama won the state of Pennsylvania with 52 percent of the vote. Democratic House candidates won 51 percent of the vote. But Democratic House candidates won only 28 percent of the state’s seats. In North Carolina, Democratic House candidates won 50.6 percent of the vote, but Republicans seized 9 of the 13 congressional seats. By 2014, they would have 10. The list goes on.

Beyond the partisan distortion, this mutilation has had the secondary but no less cancerous effect of making congressional districts deeply homogeneous. The ­Republican-favored landscape has given rise to the phenomenon of disruptive primary challenges from within the Grand Old Party. With no reward for work conducted across the aisle, Congress has turned from a place of compromise to one of extremism, as representatives fight to protect their right flanks.

Daley argues that this is the reason our legislative branch refuses to act on issues including gun control, climate change and college debt — issues with broad national support, but ones that offer little reward for Republican representatives seeking to hold their own in a hostile, conservative environment back home.

The book is disheartening and enraging in equal measure — and also occasionally dull, as when the numerous stories of electoral manipulation seem to repeat themselves. But where should the reader channel his or her anger? Certainly the Republican Party’s audacity is worthy of indignation, but its strategic expenditures and long-term focus are impressive, enviable even — especially in comparison with the bumbling Democrats, who seem to have been blindsided by the G.O.P.’s takeover. One Ohio-based election scholar says: “I’m not being partisan here. I’m just making an observation that the Democrats have been dumb about all this for a long time.”

Daley would seem to agree and suggests that the left remains ill equipped to counterattack — and ill disposed toward what would be better yet: to remove the drawing of congressional lines entirely from political hands and be done with the whole sordid mess. Instead, these distorted, Rorschachian districts are likely to continue to plague our democracy until the next census in 2020, and possibly for some time thereafter.

While the work is extraordinarily timely and undeniably important, Daley’s ­argument is perhaps a bit too zealous. No doubt this sinister practice has effectively destroyed congressional cooperation, but one has to wonder, especially this election year, whether America’s partisan divide really is simply the result of nefarious mapmaking. The rise of an angry, inchoate political force — one that has not only bucked party orthodoxy but maintained widespread grass-roots support — would seem to lend credence to the idea that progress on big-ticket issues relating to the environment and economy is not stalled just because of this miserable redistricting process, but indeed because of a growing and seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the haves and have-nots, urbanites and ­ruralists, insiders and outsiders. Then again, come Nov. 8, someone will be tasked with trying to put the country back together, and perhaps these warped districts are exactly the place to start.