One of the best history books I've ever read. Very conservative and Christian in worldview and refreshing to read a history of America that portrays its greateness instead of dwelling exclusively on the negatives. The book is balanced and does speak to those less than stellar moments in America's history but sides with the good and the provident in the end. ( )

This is a poor overview of American history with a profoundly conservative bias. There are many errors, both typographical and in the research. This is not the place to start if you don't know much about the subject, but it is instructive for an informed reader if only because it shows how ideology can skew historical persepctive. ( )

One of the best history books I've ever read. Very conservative and Christian in worldview and refreshing to read a history of America that portrays its greateness instead of dwelling exclusively on the negatives. The book is balanced and does speak to those less than stellar moments in America's history but sides with the good and the provident in the end. ( )

At almost 1000 pages of reading, plus another 100 or so of source notes, the potential reader might be forgiven for thinking of this one more in door-stop terms, but you would be sadly wrong. With nearly 400 years of American history it is hardly your normal bedtime read, but it is a brilliant "dip-in" book, whilst also being almost a bible for anyone studyiny the history of the American peoples. ( )

Paul Johnson is not really an expert in any of the fields that he writes about, but I think this gives his analyses a freshness that can be useful and illuminating. Those that have spent their entire careers focusing on one particular period or place can get locked into a certain way of seeing things, even with the best of intentions.  Johnson has the ability to just break through all of that, and to make the history interesting and exciting to boot.  I loved, for example, his illustration of the “bigness" of American frontier town design by showing the progressive widening of the main streets as one moves west. On the down side, Johnson does commit some howlers--in A History of The American People he confuses the two Civil War generals Albert Sydney Johnston and Joseph Johnston, and in The Civilization of Ancient Egypt he gets one of the main points of Egyptian writing exactly wrong (as my brother Tim pointed out after perusing the book for precisely thirty seconds)--but he is unfairly savaged for this sort of thing by establishment historians who have often spent their lives completely misunderstanding and misreporting, due to political or other sorts of biases, the nature of major periods, movements and events in history. I should point out that Johnson is not exactly contrite about his mistakes. In an oddly hostile interview on Booknotes, the author responded to Brian Lamb’s accusatory questions by implying that there is more disagreement and error in the historical sources than one would think--not exactly the most laudable defense by an historian. ( )