A politically charged work of advocacy-history, Ronald Wright splices together select, but telling, patches of America's past, darkly foreshadowing the imperialist ideology of Bush-era U.S.A. Less a history than a political lens, "What is America?", despite its occasionally conspiratorial overlay, is able to remain buoyantly playful. Persuasive, insightful and pertinent. ( )

A politically charged work of advocacy-history, Ronald Wright splices together select, but telling, patches of America's past, darkly foreshadowing the imperialist ideology of Bush-era U.S.A. Less a history than a political lens, "What is America?", despite its occasionally conspiratorial overlay, is able to remain buoyantly playful. Persuasive, insightful and pertinent. ( )

Some reviewers who don't support the contentions of this book seem to feel the author has left out relevant history to support his thesis. I think they are being uncharacteristically wishful. What actions could undo the moral outrage committed over the decades against millions of American natives, the blacks, the innocent citizens of the Philippines and Hawaii - all in the name of manifest destiny (what a horrible concept)? It would have to be a monumental and readily apparent. Any suggestions?

The greatest evil of human kind is rationalization - a clever mind game and self-delusion we thankfully don't share with other living creatures. It may be our final undoing. For those on the brink of repeating history, this book should be required reading. ( )

This book does a good job at explaining how America's geography, the timing of its discovery, economics, religion, etc., all contributed to the creation of the America we know today--specifically, the American attitude of exceptionalism, individualism, fear of socialism, warmongering, and so forth. It is a short, narrow-focused history of America, and for a good reason. The focus is on how, from the very beginning, with Columbus, America has been a nation based on expansion, growth, and empire. The empire bit is not well understood by many, but an empire is not necessarily a country that gobbles up others--though we did start that way, conquering through weapons and smallpox the civilizations thriving in America before Columbus arrived.

Wright gives the history of our current-day cultural divide which he calls "Backwoods America" and "Enlightenment America". This I found very helpful. It's hard--perhaps impossible--to find a non-biased book on the political landscape of America. This one is written by a Canadian historian, so it's refreshingly objective, though if you believe the Iraq War was justified, you will not agree with that assessment (and this book is not for you). The simple "Blue State"/"Red State" dichotomy is just that: simple, and not useful. This book spends some time (though not enough) explaining how we got to where we are now, a house divided into Liberals and Conservatives.

Though "What is America?" may seem like nothing more than a cataloguing of all the bad things we did to the Native Americans, it's more than that. It shows the myths and outright lies that we told ourselves about our past. We need to understand that we are not a people to whom the rules do not apply. We are not a country favored by God over all others. We are simply people, and we need to understand our history clearly. As Wright states, "Hope may be a virtue--and it can win elections--but hoping for the best instead of learning from the past has often led America astray." ( )

This is a book that promises great things and, in the first half at least, delivers. Here, from page 13, is what I read as the promise:

"Seen from inside by free citizens, the young United States was indeed a thriving democracy in a land of plenty; seen from below by slaves, it was a cruel tyranny; and seen from outside by free Indians, it was a ruthlessly expanding empire. All these stories are true, but if we know only one without the others, what we know is not history but myth. And such myths are dangerous."

Only one of the three stories features strongly here, the story of ruthless empire. And at times it’s very hard to read, not because it’s poorly written – on the contrary, the writing is clear, passionate, engaging - but because the story is so hideous. The murderous double talk of George Walker Bush, Dick Cheney and their comrades in arms (and even at times, I say this in sorrow, of Barack Obama when he talks of Afghanistan) has a long pedigree. We have been lied to about who lived in North America before the first Puritans arrived there – systematically lied to, and evidence contradicting the lies systematically destroyed. North America in the fifteenth century was dotted with farms, towns, and an established civilisation. Smallpox and to a lesser extent technological superiority enabled the invaders to take over a land that had been prepared for them, and they did it with a nauseating confidence that it was what God intended, then lied about who had lived there before them.

It felt to me that the book kind of lost its way towards the end, turning into an all too familiar analysis of the crimes and sins of successive US administrations from Nixon to Bush the younger. The end comes much sooner than you expect, as more than a third of the book is taken up by notes and a bibliography. I wonder if Ronald Wright had to finish it sooner than he would have liked, hearing at his back a probable Obama win at the polls coming ever nearer. Whatever its shortcomings, it’s a richly informatoive background to the Bush era, and to the challenges faced by Obama.

Ronald Wright is Canadian. Though he quotes a number of Australians, he doesn’t draw a parallel with the Australian history of dispossession and genocide, but it’s hard not to observe the difference that a couple of centuries made: as far as I’m aware no one seriously tried to claim that the Australian atrocities were done at the direct instruction of God. And it seems that the practice currently prevalent in Australia of acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, however token it may be, is a long way from making an appearance in the US. ( )