America Reborn: A Twentieth-Century Narrative in Twenty-Six Lives
by Martin Walker
Knopf, 368 pp., $29.95
Too often, surveys of American history focus only on the most famous individuals and the people immediately surrounding them, with a heavy bias toward politicans. Award-winning journalist Martin Walker (no relation) attempts to tell a story of 20th-century America with five presidents, two generals, two preachers, and a handful of entertainers. The names won’t surprise you: both Roosevelts, Wilson, Nixon, and Clinton; Pershing and Marshall; Billy Graham and Martin Luther King; Babe Ruth, Duke Ellington, Katherine Hepburn, and Walt Disney. But in advancing his left-of-center interpretation, Walker also pens chapters on “Emma Goldman and the American Dissident,” “Walter Reuther and the American Worker,” “William Boeing and the American Airplane” and “William F. Buckley Jr., and American Conservatism.” Some chapters read well as miniature social biographies, but others are made to carry too much of a burden. While it is sensible to talk about “Teddy Roosevelt and the American Ambition,” does it really work to use Katherine Hepburn as the paragon of the American star? The book is too scattershot to make it an effective primer on recent U.S. history, though Walker writes smoothly and usually spins a good yarn.
This article appears in September 29 • 2000.