Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing Book

I expected a lot more from this book, especially since Schlesinger was a famous historian and worked in the Kennedy administration (he wrote celebrated biographies of John and Bobby Kennedy. This memoir only covered the first 33 years of his life, so maybe a book on his latter years would be better. But this book is a huge exercise in name dropping. We learn not only the name of the headmaster of his prep school, but also the names of the headmasters of all the other famous prep schools. Every professor he ever had at prep school or at Harvard gets a half page explanation of who they were and what they did, as does everybody he ever worked with or was in the war with or was in his social circle. Schlesinger was an intellectual, so there's a lot of social philosophy and economic theory in the book. There's a reason I didn't like either philosophy or economics in college.