Simon Schama's "The American Future"

This book surprised me. I expected more "future" since the title "American Future" implied a peering into the future. It didn't and I should have examined the book's title a little closely. The subtitle is "a history". This book was 10% taking the pulse of America in an election year, 2008, and 90% scattered history stories.

Once I got past the surprised, I did enjoy the book. But I can't claim to understand the connection between the bits. I didn't get any sense that Schama was trying to sell an idea or open my imagination up to a new interpretation of history. This was more an entertainment than a history.

Schama did try to thread a story about the Meigs family into the book with sections on the founder, a revolutionary war hero, and offspring who helped remove the Cherokee from Georgia, and yet another generation which fought in the Civil War. That and tales of the subversion of the Cherokee by rapacious whites could have been a theme of the book but they were lost in all the other odd bits and pieces presented.

In summary, I found some pieces of this book fascinating because they gave me depth of detail in American history I had not read before, but other sections left me bored because they didn't seem significant and, to me, were uninteresting. The book is an odd pastiche. So if you want a kind of coffee table book meant to be grazed for light entertainment. This book is fine. If you are expecting a tome with more gravity. This isn't your book.