Reviews for A Brief History of American Culture

The average rating for A Brief History of American Culture based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-09 00:00:00 Ryan Sharp This book is about 350 pages long, so its defects can be excused only but so much in calling it A Brief History. It isn't that Crunden is overly conservative in his taste (he is), but that he seems unread in what he doesn't appreciate. One example: three pages after he dismisses Charles Brockden Brown as a William Godwin imitator, he praises Washington Irving as the first American writer to use unreliable narrators. Actually Brockden Brown (who came decades before Irving) wrote all of his novels with unreliable narrators, which Crunden would have known had he bothered to read them. Other problems? The book was published shortly after the height of the AIDS epidemic (1994), yet that goes unmentioned, as does Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize the prior year. Instead T.C. Boyle is credited as being the best writer of her generation, while Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and John Updike also go unmentioned. No Salinger or Vonnegut either. Faulkner yes, but Flannery O'Connor no. For postwar American literature, Josephine Hendin's Vulnerable People (1978) is not only the best guide, but it predates this book by over 15 years. (I'm being picky about the literary coverage of the 20th century because the author emphasizes it: he rushes through the 18th and 19th centuries in 150 pages, then devotes nearly 200 to this one century.) As for the other arts: drama and sculpture go entirely unnoticed. Photography, cinema, dance, musicals, and journalism are respectively represented by only Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Robeson, Merce Cunningham, George Gershwin and Tom Wolfe (what a weird bunch). That's right: this is a history of American culture without Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Fred Astaire, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Ida B. Wells, H.L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Ford, D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Leonard Bernstein or Stephen Soundheim. All painting is either early American, Abstract Expressionist or Pop Art. Not even John Singer Sargent or Norman Rockwell gets a mention. Neither do Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth nor Edward Hopper. He actually skips not only the Ashcan School and all of American realism, but modernism too, plus the Harlem Renaissance! So no Grant Wood, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Archibald Motley. What about the first indigenous modern-art movement in the United States? Nope. No Precisionism. And true to Crunden's knowledge being exclusive to only two periods (colonial and mid-20th), he includes Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg (all three of Tom Wolfe's "Cultureburg" fame), but not Bernard Berenson, the first American art historian of any importance. Musicians? Louis Armstrong is here, but not Duke Ellington. Elvis is, but not Little Richard, James Brown, Miles Davis, Motown, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan. As for intellectuals, B.F. Skinner is mentioned, but not Noam Chomsky. DuBois is, but not Thorstein Veblen or Talcott Parsons. John Rawls, but not Robert Nozick. And no Thomas Kuhn, whose 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the single most influential science book written by an American, unless you'd say Rachel Carson, who also isn't in here. The book also purports to cover religion, yet ignores Mormons, Pentecostalists, and Christian Scientists (the biggest religious movements founded in America). No Billy Graham or evangelicals either. It's as if religious life in America begins and ends with the Puritans. A book like this will ultimately be judged by its index, and it has too many major absences to take seriously. A "brief history" should function as a useful introduction; this doesn't. Stay away.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-29 00:00:00 Robert Russ Maybe it's because I read this for school, but I just didn't like it. It didn't seem to go into detail (enough for me anyway) about some of the "popular culture" described. There is a lot of popular culture out there, and I wish this book would have gone into more of it.