Reviews for The Pursuit of liberty

The average rating for The Pursuit of liberty based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-01 00:00:00 Brenda Kelley America has the world caught in two unbreakable embraces, one soft, exciting, where we all want to stay; and the other militarist, violent, careless of other peoples' countries. The first is Disney, Hollywood and rock and roll, the second Iraq, Vietnam and Fox News. I may be English to the core, but more than half of everything I read is American; probably three quarters of what I listen to is American, and, I don't know, 90% of all the movies I watch. And that's okay, if it wasn't I wouldn't do it. It's not that I'm an Americaphile, except insofar as the whole world is. America is a vast cultural factory. Its production rate is phenomenal. Who invented - and continues to invent - modern life? America. At the same time, America's politics scare me, both the internal and the external variety. Politically and economically, America isn't cosy at all, not for non-Americans, and not for quite a few Americans too. It struck me that all my American history (up to LBJ, anyway) has been told to me by singers, actors, novelists, poets, sculptors, painters, dancers, directors, everyone except historians. Hence, my attempt on this vast one-volume history of the whole shebang. As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway: I saw below me that golden valley: This land was made for you and me. Things fell into place. Hugh Brogan is like a smoothly running giant thresher machine, in goes all the human bodies, the blood, tears, heartbreak, strife and struggle and out comes neat hay-bales of rolling cadenced paragraphs. He's old school. He's the way things used to be done, as opposed to, say, Niall Ferguson, who grabs your lapels, drags you round the corner, whispers in your ear, picks your pocket, gets you drunk and leaves you in a motel somewhere in Missouri. Not so Hugh. I think there may be two mild jokes Hugh allows himself in this entire 700 pages. I'd quote them, but you wouldn't laugh. But here is the grand rolling diorama of the world's greatest experimental nation-state. Here's Jamestown, the Stamp Act, the tea party, here's the shot heard round the world, Fort Ticonderoga, Bunker Hill, Washington, the Declaration, the Constitution, slavery, Buffalo Bill Cody (an ancient lady in my family, dead 40 years, saw him live in Nottingham in 1903), Mormons, the trail of tears, the wild west, and here's slavery. For me the heart of the matter here was the story of slavery and the Civil War. This is history at its most painfully dramatic - I would say melodramatic. See them big plantations burning Hear the cracking of the whips Smell that sweet magnolia blooming See the ghosts of slavery ships I can hear them tribes a-moaning Hear that undertaker's bell And I know nobody can sing the blues Like Blind Willie McTell For the first time I understood a little bit how specifically peculiar the South was, how skewed its cotton monoculture, how profound its dreadfulness. Brogan's language is sometimes jarring in its mildness here. Many Southern women had to pretend not to notice the resemblance between their own offspring and certain little black children on the plantations : proof that their husbands and brothers had been dallying in the slave quarters. "Dallying"? How about "raping" ? Perhaps an indication, like the use of "native Americans" to mean white people born in the USA as opposed to immigrants, that this book was written in 1983. I would like to shamble discursively through American history, throwing old song lyrics and advertising jingles into the mix until I sound like a John Dos Passos novel from 1922. I'm glad I'm now clearer about what robber barons were and how machine politics works, and how John Brown's soul has had to do a whole lot of marching on, and how Obama in the White House seems even more extraordinary than I thought it was in 2008 , but I think I tax your patience enough in these reviews. This book is recommended. Swing low, chariot, come down easy Taxi to the terminal zone; Cut your engines, cool your wings, And let me make it to the telephone. Los Angeles, give me Norfolk Virginia, Tidewater four ten o nine Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin' And the poor boy is on the line

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-30 00:00:00 Edgar Laboy 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.