Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 336 pages
- Published by: Penguin Press HC, The March 13, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1594201544
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1594201547
-
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
- Weighs: 1.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
The subtitle of this latest offering from Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Wood (
The Radicalism of the American Revolution) is far grander than what he delivers between the covers: a collection of 21 book reviews of works by Simon Schama, Theodore Draper and Joyce Appleby, among others, written over the past three decades for periodicals like the
New York Review of Books and the
New Republic. Though reviews are occasional pieces not designed to be republished years later, some of Wood's pieces make enduring points. He lambastes scholars who clutter their writing with unintelligible jargon, and he worries that today's historical scholarship, too driven by present concerns, fails to retain a sense of how the past really is different. He makes clear that he prefers old-fashioned political history to cultural history that draws on postmodern theory. Indeed, the book is maddeningly repetitive: Wood invokes Peter Novick's
This Noble Dream over and over, though not as often as he laments the use of theory in cultural history and the radical Foucault-like agendas that seem to drive certain literary historians. This volume is not without merit, but rather than appending a short afterword to each review, Wood would have done better to craft a new, unified reflection on the discipline of history.
(Mar. 17) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Review
"I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced…." --
New York Sun"[Wood] possesses as profound a grasp of the early days of the Republic as anyone now working…." --
New York Times Book Review
--This text refers to the
Audio Cassette
edition.
Reader ReviewsI found this to be just an extremely valuable collection of essays by Gordon S. Wood, one of our leading historians of the colonial and early national period (see his "The Creation of the American Republic" among other studies), consisting of 21 of his review essays. These essays originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, or the Atlantic between 1981-2007. The book's impact derives from several considerations. First, it is Wood who is writing the reviews, with tempered judgment (for the most part) and unimpeachable command of the material. Second, what Wood is up to is to illustrate trends or approaches in writing American history, as demonstrated in the various books under review. Some of the approaches or "trends" that Wood discusses, sometimes quite critically, include influence in intellectual history; writing history from the perspective of "contemporary consciousness"; is there still a place for good narrative history?; is the "new historicism" correct that everything is relative?; can history be written as fiction (Schama's "Dead Certainties" the subject of review); microhistory; multicultural history; comparative history; postmodern history; history and myth; and "presentism." His authors include Gary Wills; Joyce Appleby; Elkin & McKitrick; Gary Nash; Jon Butler; Jill Lapore; Pauline Maier and many others. If Wood had written a straight substantive article on trends in history, the reader's eyes might become glazed over. But the device of introducing and discussing (and sometimes deconstructing) each approach within the framework of reviewing a book manifesting that approach, keeps things much more interesting and lively than one might expect. Wood also has included a useful introductory essay and an index. So the book is a fun way to learn an awful lot about the writing of American history in this country during the last quarter century or so.
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