The American Future: A History From The Founding Fathers To Barack Obama

Description

A timely and masterful history of the world's most controversial superpower, by one of the world's most popular and distinguished historians. The American Future traces the history of a country whose most enduring trait is its capacity for self-renewal, especially at times of disaster. Examining issues of power, race and immigration, religious fervour and prosperity, this masterful portrait of the world's most controversial superpower looks backwards and forwards to understand why now, more than ever, the fate of America, and by extension the rest of the world, is hanging in the balance.

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. His award-winning books, translated into fifteen languages, include Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, The American Future, The Face of Britain and The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE - 1492). His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented forty films for BBC2 on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy, American politics and John Donne.

Schama is a genius of storytelling * The Times * The American Future shares Kerouac's almost inebriated eloquence, the words tumbling delightfully across the page, the sentences as playfully ornate as the Charlie Parker saxophone solos that Kerouac so adored... Also an inspiring and illuminating work of history, a reflection on the essence of America with a bedrock of deep knowledge behind the bebop prose. A more inspiring evocation of the spirit of liberal America - past, present and future - does not exist -- Niall Ferguson * Financial Times * The master storyteller takes on the greatest story of our time, America ... Essential reading * Tatler * This is the most exhilarating book that has been written about America for at least eight years...ebulliently combative...instantly engaging...weaving the immediate present with its earlier history... Schama has delivered a glittering tale of America's past * Spectator * A wonderfully thought-provoking book... Schama continually illuminates the broad sweep of events with reference to telling details...fascinating * Daily Express *