Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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63 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent read, American history with the red meat on.. , 22 Oct 2008
This book is for those of you who like history as a sweep of events and with interlocking sections that you have to piece together to get your overall picture. Although this makes reference to the current election I think its only because I think the author sees the two candidates as potentially the Hamilton and Jefferson characters of this age - one quite happy to use American military strength and the other very sey against it. And its this split in the US approach that the four sections of the book address. The four sections cover war, religion , what is an american, and the belief you can have it all if you just try hard enough and while I don;t think you get a full final view I think the observation at the end that the role of government is about making people happy and not to destroy life is hard to argue with.
Apart from the violence of the Civil War which had some horrific parts what these sections bring to vivid life in the internal violence in US history , the programs against the Cherokee, the violence and hatred against the black population as they battled for civil rights, the mis tratment of Chinese and Mexicans and they were killed with impunity and with legal sanction makes for some grim reading. The section on religion makes it very clear why religion plays such a big part in US politics and you can see why as it was and till is a vital way to express a sense of community. The best part for me was the section on multiculturalism where its clear that you can retain a sense of your roots in the US AND still be an American with a fierce committment to the country
It was with a sense of diappointment that I finished this book simply bacause I had not had enough of the American story which is spite of the things done still seems essentially optimistic - and so if Obama wants to use the phase 'Yes we can' then this book will help explain why his audience responds to it
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So, it may not be foolish to hope , 11 Jan 2009
Simon Schama's American Future opens at what would prove to be the threshold of a new era in US History, as Democrats and Republicans prepare to campaign in the 2008 presidential election which would eventually see Barack Obama victorious. But the journey to this point, as Schama goes on to remind us, has not been easy, and at times things could have turned out very differently.
Schama's sometimes idiosyncratic chronology serves well to make this point, darting backwards and forwards in time to build his themes - nominally the likes of war, plenty and faith - but intercut throughout by the constant presence until remarkably recently of racial segregation, ethnic cleansing and untethered imperialism.
The history lesson begins with Union Civil War Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. Meigs's story is particularly apposite, as he not only believed in the Union but also was a strong abolitionist, being the driving force behind the creation of African American regiments participating in the war, and delighting in the irony of former slaves acting as guards at the PoW camps for captured Confederate soldiers. A strong supporter of Lincoln, Meigs was present when the President died following the assassination.
Subsequent to this, Schama conveys well the horrendous turnaround of the 1870s when the federal troops enforcing the Reconstruction of the south were withdrawn by Samuel Tilden and the erstwhile freed slaves suddenly became prey to the depredations of Klansmen as the Reconstruction was abandoned. Ironic that even the sine qua non of imperialism, Great Britain, set a better example, in fact took the lead, in the abolition of the institutions of racial oppression, and he also reminds us that one of the ways Mexico was way ahead of the US, under British influence, was in abolishing slavery, and hints at a point made much more strongly by Robert Kagan in Dangerous Nation: a key driver behind the Texas landgrab was to establish another slaver state to add to the votes against abolition in Washington DC.
Sardonically, Schama covers the Mexican War, which ultimately led to the acquisition not only of Texas but also of New Mexico and California, from the Mexican angle, describing the inflow of undesirables to Texas in much the same language as is used to describe the "wetbacks" flowing in the other direction today.
Interestingly, not all white settlers flew the supremacist flag: drive along I10 between Houston and San Antonio and you see in the place names the evidence of the early German settlers in Texas, and it was they, we are told, who set an example to their Anglo compatriots in opposing slavery and making a point of running cotton plantations on free labour.
The legacy of slavery, segregation and deprivation figure prominently in other recent books: in The Ascent Of Money, Niall Ferguson tells of the difficulties black inhabitants of Detroit's 8 Mile district have in securing mortgages due to creditworthiness boundaries; Michael Lewis's The Blind Side describes the lawlessness and poverty of West Memphis; and in Gang Leader For A Day Sudhir Venkatash describes the daily struggle for life in the projects of Obama's own Chicago. To say that Obama's election carries a level of hope and potential for disappointment comparable to those attendant on Nelson Mandela's ascent to power is almost a truism.
Schama has a wry humour that characterises some of his commentary, as for example where he attests that the result of President McInley's communing with his God over the matter was a three-point manifesto leading to the Spanish War, and secondly with his observation that this same God, in whose protective powers McInley set great store, was on a day off the President was assassinated.
The whole thing is mostly beautifully written and the story so compelling that I often found I had read ten pages almost without realising I'd turned one, though I struggled to forgive the possessive Meigs' rather than the correct Meigs's. I also got the feeling towards the end that the author was struggling for a conclusion.
Nevertheless, this is a well worthwhile read, and holds out the possibility that maybe Obama's message of Hope is not a vain one.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An idiosyncratic but irresistible book, 14 Feb 2009
Thus spake 'The Economist' in its inimitable and incisive style for the idiosyncratic author in the first paragraph in a review on the book:
'There is little point in picking up a book by Simon Schama and expecting conventional history. And this latest work by the prolific and increasingly televisual Columbia University professor is no counter-example. It divides itself into four large sections, each dealing with a different thread that the author discerns running through the fabric of America's evolution. But within each section, Mr Schama darts about like a mad thing, flipping from receptions at Downing street to Mexican-ruled Texas, from Barack Obama's victory in Iowa's caucus last January (January 2008) to the bitterest fields of the civil war. There is no point in complaining about this, no matter how deranged it might make the reader feel:it is just the way that Mr Schama does things. As such, it has its own particular charm'.
And lest be accused of plagiarism, I readily acknowledge that the ensuing is also excerpted from 'The Economist' review and that I shall meticulously place the excerpts in quotations.
That the past is interwoven with the present is not a singularly American phenomenon but 'Mr Schama's list is the list of exceptionalisms that most
people would probably draw up when contemplating this vast and extraordinary continent:its military might, its religious fervour, its immigration-shaped, ethnic variety, its staggering abundance'.
'Cleverly Mr Schama seems to pair each of these active forces with its equal and opposite reaction. The militarist, even imperial avocation of an Alexander Hamilton or a Theodore Roosevelt is countered by a Jeffersonian wariness of war as the sport of tyrants. The deep religiosity of America is contrasted with the separation of church and state. For every Hector St John de Crevecoeur, an 18th-century French immigrant who sees America the land where "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men", there is a James Madison, who worries that loutish settlers without skills and fortune "are not the people we are in want of". Even the promise of America's boundless plenty was countered, in the minds of the colonial British administration, by a fear of the unknown and a kind of terror of extending empire beyond defensible natural limits'.
Needless to add that I do not anticipate that this exercise will receive any votes, either helpful or not helpful. Its sole aim was to intimate the reader on the content, merit, idiosyncracy and flavour of the book as viewed through the penetrating intellect of The Economist's reviewer with whom I am very obviously in complete agreement.
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