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j_lange's review against another edition
2.0
Johnson believes in the "big-man" school of history. While this isn't necessarily wrong or unsatisfying at times, he misses what I feel is very important bits of American history. His tone is frequently incredibly pompous and obnoxious, which doesn't help me like him.
sureiken's review against another edition
4.0
The Anti Howard Zinn. This is a history of the United States written from a conservative viewpoint. It deserved 5 stars but the author made the mistake of extending the history till his own lifetime: he mixes history with his politics and the few last chapters are not up to the book standard.
poetlaurelate's review against another edition
3.0
I had only good things to say about this book until I reached the 1930s. Johnson does a great job of inserting anecdotes, and making 19th century presidential history palatable (something which, for me, is not easy). Beginning at about FDR, though, it's clear that he has a conservative bias, which grew more and more offensive throughout. The crowning moment, for me, was when he compared anti-choice activists to anti-slavery activists...a bit of a reach.
Read this book for the older narrative, but if you don't vote GOP stop after Calvin Coolidge.
Read this book for the older narrative, but if you don't vote GOP stop after Calvin Coolidge.
muhly22's review against another edition
3.0
This book gets 3 stars because the author is (characteristically, based on several of his other books I've read) fairly long-winded. Johnson gives his readers a mind-numbing amount of statistics and numbers (you can find the popular vote totals for most, if not all, presidential elections, for instance).
spinnerroweok's review against another edition
4.0
Long. Very long. This was a 47 hour audiobook. If you want a British conservative take on American history, this is it. Johnson not only tells you American history, he is also very clear on who he thinks is right and wrong. Examples: Hoover: wrong for starting the New Deal, FDR: a media personality who stole most of his New Deal ideas from Hoover, Truman: awesome, JFK: his father's whore-dog puppet, Nixon: a great leader who was assassinated by the media, Carter: a dowdy man with no ideas, Reagan: Mr. Personality with ideas, Bush: Thatcher's puppet, Clinton: a country bumpkin. I recommend. It is and interesting book.
guinness74's review against another edition
5.0
Paul Johnson has created an incredible account the people in American history with a wonderfully rich, inherently readable, and not grotesquely detailed prose. Naturally, assuming a task of covering more than four centuries is an arduous task, but to focus on more than just the major players involves quite a bit of planning. Johnson follows a political timeline with interesting offshoots that relay a variety of color commentary regarding the twists and turns of this great country.
I highly recommend this book, mostly because it's great to have a refresher on the things you don't necessarily remember from high school. Also, as it is written from an outsider's perspective (Johnson is English), there is very little to take issue with from a bias standpoint. I did find my attitude changing regarding events and personalities in history, both for good and ill. Unfortunately, the book, written in 1997, is already sadly outdated. Johnson's upbeat optimism toward the end of the book belies an ignorance of both the events of 9/11, the turmoil of the Bush v. Gore election, and the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as dividing forces in American society. I would enjoy an evening with Johnson to discuss how his views may or may not have changed in the past decade and a half.
I highly recommend this book, mostly because it's great to have a refresher on the things you don't necessarily remember from high school. Also, as it is written from an outsider's perspective (Johnson is English), there is very little to take issue with from a bias standpoint. I did find my attitude changing regarding events and personalities in history, both for good and ill. Unfortunately, the book, written in 1997, is already sadly outdated. Johnson's upbeat optimism toward the end of the book belies an ignorance of both the events of 9/11, the turmoil of the Bush v. Gore election, and the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as dividing forces in American society. I would enjoy an evening with Johnson to discuss how his views may or may not have changed in the past decade and a half.
lpm100's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
5.0
TRUNCATED REVIEW
Book Review (IV/IV), pps. 727-976
"A History of the American People"
Paul Johnson
*******
Of the book
972 pps/ 8 parts≈122 pages per
1,950 source notes ≈244/chapter, 2/page
This is the 4th (and final) review section of a book that is SSSOOOO LLLOOONNNGGG that I've had to break it into pieces.
General thoughts (recapitulated):
It's like drinking water through a fire hose, and (as often with history books) the large number of names and dates blend into an impressionistic farrago of ideas.
This book took a VERY LONG time to read (and that is after sitting on my shelf for 8 years), because of:
1. The small print on large pages, and;
2. The necessity to go back and extract the vocabulary words as well as review/re-synopsize what I had learned from each section.
Alas, I don't think it's nearly enough; for this reader, the book has the aforementioned impressionistic feel precisely *because* the sheer mass of information makes significant retention almost impossible.
A significant bad side is that with so many historical events, it is very easy to go back and reconstruct different narratives to suit the political topic of whatever generation is reading.... But I do think that Johnson puts events in their proper context.
I *do* tend to believe did this author (Paul Johnson is an Englishman) as a neutral party to American history. And that is very needful in these days where every single historical event is reinterpreted in terms of Someone's Political Agenda/Ax to Grind
This third section is interesting, because it seems to make *prodigious* use of the "ni**er" word--and I do appreciate it somewhat, because it is an attempt to portray history as it actually happened and not as a sanitized version.
*******
¶¶¶Section 7(1929-1960)
1. Chevrolet / Pontiac/Oldsmobile/Buick/Cadillac initially invented to cover five different major price brackets, each car in numerous versions.
2. There never existed anything like a proper Gold Standard in the years leading up to the Depression; Central bankers could exchange gold bars with each other, but common folk could not walk into a bank and redeem dollars for gold on demand.
3. Nothing is new, only remembered: debt super cycles / beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policy/ attempts to disinvent the business cycle/ bubble blowing central bankers go back at least a century, and nearly at the inception of the Central Bank / Federal Reserve.
4. It has been happening at least since the 1930s that politicians use the IRS to pursue personal vendettas. Lois Lerner and the targeting of conservative groups is the new thing that was not. (p.758, 871, 897).
5. Believe it or not, Roosevelt was a believer in a balanced budget.
6. Johnson seems to describe the Roosevelt administration as lawless, and he could just as easily have been talking about a lot of Democratic administrations.
Seems like all got their inspiration from Roosevelt:
i. IRS vendettas;
ii. Court packing (p.768);
iii. Executive overreach/ pardons of allies (p.761)
7. The Japanese leadership was insane. They chose to fight a war against a country that had: steel advantage, 20:1, oil 10:1, coal 10:1, aircraft 5:1, shipping 2:1, labor force 5:1, overall 10 to 1 (p.778).
8. Johnson portrays US involvement in World War II as a classic merger between the government and high technology capitalism. (Mercifully, he refrains from using the word "military industrial complex.")
9. Truman is treated here at length as an honorable man who was, ironically, a product of machine politics from Kansas. (It appears that Kansas was another Chicago.)
10. Eisenhower seems to be an overlooked figure that Johnson gives credit to. Johnson describes him as a very measured, calculating and devious statecraftsman. Comparable to Winston Churchill. He was a believer in minimum war, sound money and a balanced budget and he kept to it.
Second order thoughts:
1. With respect to the Great Depression, there are two stories: one of overregulation and the other of underregulation. Almost a century after the actual events, it doesn't seem like we are any closer to a definitive answer.
2. Roosevelt is most associated with the New Deal, but Paul Johnson is of the opinion that that actually started with Hoover.
3. Roosevelt is a classic example of the politician who wants power, and he will be all things to all people insofar as it gives him power. He was the Bill/Hillary Clinton of his era.
4. Disarmament has never solved anything, and pacifism/appeasement was a stupid idea even when the British practiced it against Germany. Give an inch, and they will take a mile.
5. (p.767). The Jewish factor in these events is obscure. They were 15% of Roosevelt's appointments, but not most of them and not enough to be thought of as the driving factor. It is interesting (as even other people like Dennis Prager have noted) that they are disproportionately represented in radical / sinister movements. But, not (exactly) causative agents.
(p.834): The people who passed atomic secrets to Russia were: Harry Gold/David and Ruth Greenglass/Julius and Ethel Rosenberg / Morton Sobell. (Extremely unusual, given the vicious anti-semitism of Russia-- historically, then, and now.)
Saul Landau was a lionizer of Fidel Castro (p.866).
Daniel Ellsberg could not wait to reveal articles about US involvement in Vietnam
6. It is amazing how often leadership in the country will start a war with someone that they *know* that they are hopelessly over-matched against and get tons of Other People's Son's killed. Japan against the US; US against Vietnam; Germany against Russia; Union against Confederacy. And then it stops, and there was no reason and the countries become allies in the very. next. generation.
¶¶¶Section 8(1960-1997)
1. The '60s are seen here as the beginning of America's decline phase; Johnson traces the corruption of media to this period, as well as the decline in governance/moral standards - - aided and abetted by a corrupt media. (p.847)
2. The Kennedy Dynasty was also the personification of venality and corruption. (p.851. Cash payments of $50 to help out at the polls. Ghost written journal articles. Hagiographies. Hookers. Thrice weekly drug/cortisone injections. p.899, raids of the homes of political enemies)
3. JFK may have been a lot of things, but a self-made man he was not (even the marriage between JFK and Jackie was actually brokered by Joe the patriarch), nor a competent statecraftsman.
4. Lee Harvey Oswald was a citizen of the Soviet union. And a Marxist. And a Castro supporter.
5. Vietnam had 8.7 million Americans performing military service. And 47,244 battle deaths. Three times the total amount of bomb tonnage dropped in the second world war. A million civilians / soldiers wounded on the Vietnam side. And all for who knows what?
6. Cambodia and Laos were created by French people, and don't actually have that long of a history (p.878).
7. "The experience of the 20th century shows that self-imposed restraints by civilized power are worse than useless. They are seen by friend and enemies like as evidence not of humanity, but of guilt and of lack of moral conviction." (p.883). Johnson puts the failure in Vietnam down to a lack of willpower and decisiveness.
8. It's amazing just how overwhelming the Reagan victory was. 525 to 13 Electoral College majority. "Great Communicator" was the title given to Ronald Reagan, and it's interesting that he started his career as an actor, then a spokesman for general electric and then finally morphed into being a politician.
9. As far back as the time of publication of this book, Congress was composed about 2/3 of lawyers.
10. The influential Gunner Myrtle was a disciple of Nietzsche and he had a profound/negative impact on racial policies in the US.
11. Since the 1965 immigration reform act, the US has become a dumping ground for immigrants from the Third world. Immigrants from Europe used to be over 50%, and now they are less than 10%.
Stats
(p.966):
-165,000 out of 10.3 million violent crimes led to convictions.
-100,000 prison sentences out of 165,000 convictions.
(p. 971):
-1920s, illegitimate births less than 3%; 30% by 1991
-1960, 73,000 never married mothers; 1990, 2.9 million
-illegitimate births by 1991: 68% for blacks, 39% for latinos, 18% for whites. 90% in Washington DC
Second order thoughts:
1. After the '60s and the Kennedy Dynasty/machine, it appears that American presidents were something close to PR technicians than proper statesman.
2. LBJ was the snowflake the start of the avalanche of out of control government spending. (Incidentally, Bill Clinton was not the first pants-dropping pervert in the white house. Nasty LBJ may have been the first, as well as other disgusting habits such as holding meetings while he was sitting on the toilet defecating.)
3. Freedom of the press is not necessarily a good idea. It has been said that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," and that is a recurring theme throughout this book: the media are most certainly not honest brokers.
And let's not even talk about the competition between New York Times and Washington Post to see who can give away the most national secrets.
4. People have questions about how much logic was behind his strategies, but the strongest suit was getting the messages across. And that works in reverse: you can have and executive with nothing to say, but as long as he can say it well he can get people to follow him. (B. Hussein Obama was a case in point example.)
5. When you have organizations that try to become too inclusive, they lose their definition. This is true as the experience of a lot of mainline Protestant churches that lost huge chunks of their membership. Karl Popper also has talked about the paradox of tolerance as a destructive force for civilizations.
Final verdicts:
1. These events (self-generation / stagnation/decline / collapse) are not unique to the United States, and in that sense the events of this book are trivial. Some people like to imagine that if there was an avalanche that if they had found the snowflake that caused that they could have prevented it.
But in reality, the point is the initial state of the system..... And if it had not been the Kennedy Machine at the beginning of US decline, then it just would have been some other.
Or, more generally, if it had not been these specific people profiled here making stupid choices, then it just would have been some other ones.
2. I'm leaning toward the conclusion that: This book is probably worth rereading at 5-year intervals in order to try to glean more pieces of this OVERWHELMING amount of information. (But, since the cycle of stagnation in decline really isn't unique, then is it really worth rereading?)
3. For everyday American people, the overwhelming majority of them are TOTALLY UNAWARE of of historical events that happened even 20 years ago, let alone centuries ago. And whatever you learn here will create many fewer people to whom you can speak.
Vocabulary:
dégringolade
pari passu
gink
satrap
clerisy
trestle
valedictory
toff
ecumenical
chatelaine
Defcon-2
factotum
grapeshot
pediment
sambo/ quadroon/ mustifini/quintiroon / octaroon (different terms to describe the degree of black ancestry a person has in use in British Caribbean colonies)
ichthyology
Seven Sisters (American Baptist / Disciples of
Christ/Episcopal Church / Evangelical Lutheran Church / Presbyterian Church / United Church of Christ/United Methodist Church)
Book Review (IV/IV), pps. 727-976
"A History of the American People"
Paul Johnson
*******
Of the book
972 pps/ 8 parts≈122 pages per
1,950 source notes ≈244/chapter, 2/page
This is the 4th (and final) review section of a book that is SSSOOOO LLLOOONNNGGG that I've had to break it into pieces.
General thoughts (recapitulated):
It's like drinking water through a fire hose, and (as often with history books) the large number of names and dates blend into an impressionistic farrago of ideas.
This book took a VERY LONG time to read (and that is after sitting on my shelf for 8 years), because of:
1. The small print on large pages, and;
2. The necessity to go back and extract the vocabulary words as well as review/re-synopsize what I had learned from each section.
Alas, I don't think it's nearly enough; for this reader, the book has the aforementioned impressionistic feel precisely *because* the sheer mass of information makes significant retention almost impossible.
A significant bad side is that with so many historical events, it is very easy to go back and reconstruct different narratives to suit the political topic of whatever generation is reading.... But I do think that Johnson puts events in their proper context.
I *do* tend to believe did this author (Paul Johnson is an Englishman) as a neutral party to American history. And that is very needful in these days where every single historical event is reinterpreted in terms of Someone's Political Agenda/Ax to Grind
This third section is interesting, because it seems to make *prodigious* use of the "ni**er" word--and I do appreciate it somewhat, because it is an attempt to portray history as it actually happened and not as a sanitized version.
*******
¶¶¶Section 7(1929-1960)
1. Chevrolet / Pontiac/Oldsmobile/Buick/Cadillac initially invented to cover five different major price brackets, each car in numerous versions.
2. There never existed anything like a proper Gold Standard in the years leading up to the Depression; Central bankers could exchange gold bars with each other, but common folk could not walk into a bank and redeem dollars for gold on demand.
3. Nothing is new, only remembered: debt super cycles / beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policy/ attempts to disinvent the business cycle/ bubble blowing central bankers go back at least a century, and nearly at the inception of the Central Bank / Federal Reserve.
4. It has been happening at least since the 1930s that politicians use the IRS to pursue personal vendettas. Lois Lerner and the targeting of conservative groups is the new thing that was not. (p.758, 871, 897).
5. Believe it or not, Roosevelt was a believer in a balanced budget.
6. Johnson seems to describe the Roosevelt administration as lawless, and he could just as easily have been talking about a lot of Democratic administrations.
Seems like all got their inspiration from Roosevelt:
i. IRS vendettas;
ii. Court packing (p.768);
iii. Executive overreach/ pardons of allies (p.761)
7. The Japanese leadership was insane. They chose to fight a war against a country that had: steel advantage, 20:1, oil 10:1, coal 10:1, aircraft 5:1, shipping 2:1, labor force 5:1, overall 10 to 1 (p.778).
8. Johnson portrays US involvement in World War II as a classic merger between the government and high technology capitalism. (Mercifully, he refrains from using the word "military industrial complex.")
9. Truman is treated here at length as an honorable man who was, ironically, a product of machine politics from Kansas. (It appears that Kansas was another Chicago.)
10. Eisenhower seems to be an overlooked figure that Johnson gives credit to. Johnson describes him as a very measured, calculating and devious statecraftsman. Comparable to Winston Churchill. He was a believer in minimum war, sound money and a balanced budget and he kept to it.
Second order thoughts:
1. With respect to the Great Depression, there are two stories: one of overregulation and the other of underregulation. Almost a century after the actual events, it doesn't seem like we are any closer to a definitive answer.
2. Roosevelt is most associated with the New Deal, but Paul Johnson is of the opinion that that actually started with Hoover.
3. Roosevelt is a classic example of the politician who wants power, and he will be all things to all people insofar as it gives him power. He was the Bill/Hillary Clinton of his era.
4. Disarmament has never solved anything, and pacifism/appeasement was a stupid idea even when the British practiced it against Germany. Give an inch, and they will take a mile.
5. (p.767). The Jewish factor in these events is obscure. They were 15% of Roosevelt's appointments, but not most of them and not enough to be thought of as the driving factor. It is interesting (as even other people like Dennis Prager have noted) that they are disproportionately represented in radical / sinister movements. But, not (exactly) causative agents.
(p.834): The people who passed atomic secrets to Russia were: Harry Gold/David and Ruth Greenglass/Julius and Ethel Rosenberg / Morton Sobell. (Extremely unusual, given the vicious anti-semitism of Russia-- historically, then, and now.)
Saul Landau was a lionizer of Fidel Castro (p.866).
Daniel Ellsberg could not wait to reveal articles about US involvement in Vietnam
6. It is amazing how often leadership in the country will start a war with someone that they *know* that they are hopelessly over-matched against and get tons of Other People's Son's killed. Japan against the US; US against Vietnam; Germany against Russia; Union against Confederacy. And then it stops, and there was no reason and the countries become allies in the very. next. generation.
¶¶¶Section 8(1960-1997)
1. The '60s are seen here as the beginning of America's decline phase; Johnson traces the corruption of media to this period, as well as the decline in governance/moral standards - - aided and abetted by a corrupt media. (p.847)
2. The Kennedy Dynasty was also the personification of venality and corruption. (p.851. Cash payments of $50 to help out at the polls. Ghost written journal articles. Hagiographies. Hookers. Thrice weekly drug/cortisone injections. p.899, raids of the homes of political enemies)
3. JFK may have been a lot of things, but a self-made man he was not (even the marriage between JFK and Jackie was actually brokered by Joe the patriarch), nor a competent statecraftsman.
4. Lee Harvey Oswald was a citizen of the Soviet union. And a Marxist. And a Castro supporter.
5. Vietnam had 8.7 million Americans performing military service. And 47,244 battle deaths. Three times the total amount of bomb tonnage dropped in the second world war. A million civilians / soldiers wounded on the Vietnam side. And all for who knows what?
6. Cambodia and Laos were created by French people, and don't actually have that long of a history (p.878).
7. "The experience of the 20th century shows that self-imposed restraints by civilized power are worse than useless. They are seen by friend and enemies like as evidence not of humanity, but of guilt and of lack of moral conviction." (p.883). Johnson puts the failure in Vietnam down to a lack of willpower and decisiveness.
8. It's amazing just how overwhelming the Reagan victory was. 525 to 13 Electoral College majority. "Great Communicator" was the title given to Ronald Reagan, and it's interesting that he started his career as an actor, then a spokesman for general electric and then finally morphed into being a politician.
9. As far back as the time of publication of this book, Congress was composed about 2/3 of lawyers.
10. The influential Gunner Myrtle was a disciple of Nietzsche and he had a profound/negative impact on racial policies in the US.
11. Since the 1965 immigration reform act, the US has become a dumping ground for immigrants from the Third world. Immigrants from Europe used to be over 50%, and now they are less than 10%.
Stats
(p.966):
-165,000 out of 10.3 million violent crimes led to convictions.
-100,000 prison sentences out of 165,000 convictions.
(p. 971):
-1920s, illegitimate births less than 3%; 30% by 1991
-1960, 73,000 never married mothers; 1990, 2.9 million
-illegitimate births by 1991: 68% for blacks, 39% for latinos, 18% for whites. 90% in Washington DC
Second order thoughts:
1. After the '60s and the Kennedy Dynasty/machine, it appears that American presidents were something close to PR technicians than proper statesman.
2. LBJ was the snowflake the start of the avalanche of out of control government spending. (Incidentally, Bill Clinton was not the first pants-dropping pervert in the white house. Nasty LBJ may have been the first, as well as other disgusting habits such as holding meetings while he was sitting on the toilet defecating.)
3. Freedom of the press is not necessarily a good idea. It has been said that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes," and that is a recurring theme throughout this book: the media are most certainly not honest brokers.
And let's not even talk about the competition between New York Times and Washington Post to see who can give away the most national secrets.
4. People have questions about how much logic was behind his strategies, but the strongest suit was getting the messages across. And that works in reverse: you can have and executive with nothing to say, but as long as he can say it well he can get people to follow him. (B. Hussein Obama was a case in point example.)
5. When you have organizations that try to become too inclusive, they lose their definition. This is true as the experience of a lot of mainline Protestant churches that lost huge chunks of their membership. Karl Popper also has talked about the paradox of tolerance as a destructive force for civilizations.
Final verdicts:
1. These events (self-generation / stagnation/decline / collapse) are not unique to the United States, and in that sense the events of this book are trivial. Some people like to imagine that if there was an avalanche that if they had found the snowflake that caused that they could have prevented it.
But in reality, the point is the initial state of the system..... And if it had not been the Kennedy Machine at the beginning of US decline, then it just would have been some other.
Or, more generally, if it had not been these specific people profiled here making stupid choices, then it just would have been some other ones.
2. I'm leaning toward the conclusion that: This book is probably worth rereading at 5-year intervals in order to try to glean more pieces of this OVERWHELMING amount of information. (But, since the cycle of stagnation in decline really isn't unique, then is it really worth rereading?)
3. For everyday American people, the overwhelming majority of them are TOTALLY UNAWARE of of historical events that happened even 20 years ago, let alone centuries ago. And whatever you learn here will create many fewer people to whom you can speak.
Vocabulary:
dégringolade
pari passu
gink
satrap
clerisy
trestle
valedictory
toff
ecumenical
chatelaine
Defcon-2
factotum
grapeshot
pediment
sambo/ quadroon/ mustifini/quintiroon / octaroon (different terms to describe the degree of black ancestry a person has in use in British Caribbean colonies)
ichthyology
Seven Sisters (American Baptist / Disciples of
Christ/Episcopal Church / Evangelical Lutheran Church / Presbyterian Church / United Church of Christ/United Methodist Church)
gls_merch's review against another edition
5.0
So much detail about American history that you never learned in high school or college.
More...