The Americans: The Democratic Experience

There is one idea of Boorstin that seems to me to explain a tremendous amount about American civilization. He claims that it is by small improvements in life, by the power of invention which made life better bit by bit American civilization moved ahead. Emerson's ' better mousetrap which all beat their way to the inventor's door to get'is Boorstin's key to American greatness. This work is filled with tremendous insight and knowledge into American reality.

Aside from the fact that Daniel Boorstin writes with real grace, which makes this final volume in his trilogy about American life a pleasure to read, it is filled with a consideration of subjects that you most likely never thought about as being part of "American history"--at least as it's taught in school--yet these are the events and the people who made the world we actually LIVE in: the businessmen and idea people who created the mail-order catalogue, the department store, the oil industry, and even the divorce industry, which played a surprising commercial role in the American west. Boorstin tells about people whose names have become household words (like Sears & Roebuck, or Dunn & Bradstreet)and how their ideas helped build the country and the life we know today; he tells about the cattle drives and the range wars; about inventions, and business, and how the democratization of shopping in the big department stores was a quintessentially American development. Every chapter has its fascination for the reader--at least for THIS reader. Ideas or practices that I simply accepted as "the way things are" prove often to be unique American inventions, and knowing this helps us know more about who we are, and why we are seen as different from the rest of the world (even as they start to copy us in so many ways).

The author takes the reader to the heart of history; the people. He finds the people who may be obscure but their role in the story he tells serve to make us realize their really is an American spirit. Kudos to Boorstin and the people he portrays