The Idea of America

The Arguments of America might have been a better title because this is the story of conflicting interest groups and warring philosophies. Jefferson had one idea of America, Madison another. Nor is this book a single text. It consists instead of 11 essays, written over decades. Wood's fascination with the power and origin of ideas is contagious, but the Pulitzer-winning historian is always looking down from 30,000 feet. Abstractions can be narrated with force, and Robert Fass does his job, but then abstractions are, after all, just that--amusing but rarely intimate. If the listener takes nothing else away, at least the vision of the Founding Fathers as a gathering of companionable saints in periwigs must die a terrible death. B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine