I read this because I so appreciated the author's Only Yesterday back when I read it in 1946 as a senior in high school. This is a different type of retrospective look back (in 1952) at the USA in the first half of the 20th century. It has interest in that it shows how an intelligent spectator (he was editor of Harper's from 1941 till nearly the time when he died in 1954) saw the country--somewhat more hopefully than some of the observors of the time, and before the space age, Vietnam, the computer, and Brown v. Board of Education. ( )