John Clare Book

There is something about the cousinly relationship, the pre- and post-revolutionary national development, the subtle shades of Anglo-Saxon linguistic nuance - heck, the whole I say, old boy, that's a rather marvelous thing you Yanks have got going there - that allows the British to be amongst the best interpreters and recorders of US history, and Hugh Brogan is no exception. There have been some first rate titles in the Pelican'Penguin History series, but this tome surely emerges at the very uppermost level.

The two-hundred-plus years that have passed in the life of the young republic have been some of the most inspiring, event-filled, and significant that have elapsed in the entire recorded history of mankind. Brogan captures the excitement of this rapid-pace nation-building, full of illimitable and exuberant potentiality and disciplined spirituality, but erected upon an edifice permanently stained by the cruel injustice of slavery and a curious, ofttimes ill-fitting guise of coarse, inexhaustible materialism. From the earliest coastal settlements through to the eventide gloom of Cardigan Carter and the buoyant Morning in America of Ronald Reagan, Brogan applies the lens of an impartial observer to the onrushing threads of a continental destiny. Although - like in so many general US histories - the years of financial-industrial gigantism and political graft of the late 19th century receive less attention than is warranted, there are really few flaws in this vastly readable undertaking. Brogan's tome is of a level with that masterwork from a scion of a renowned American pedigree, Samuel Eliot Morrison; and combined with the antipodal interpretations from the progressive Zinn and the conservative Johnson, there would be little that happened in the overarching development from hardscrabble colony to global superpower that wasn't illuminated from every angle for the reader's edification. Highly recommended.