Book Review of THESE TRUTHS: The America You Need to Know
Jill Lepore’s new book, These Truths (A History of the United States), has become personal. When I first read Andrew Sullivan’s astonishing review of it in The New York Times, I was almost afraid to buy it. I did not want to be disappointed. Well before she wrote this “history of the United States”, Lepore was at the very top of my list of current American History scholars. Everything she touches sparkles with insight, irony and grace. Those are big words – she more than fills what they imply. Her articles in The New Yorker are remarkable not just for what she contributes to our understanding of this country but how often she produces them. The fact that she had this massive, astonishing “history of the United States” boiling along while writing almost monthly columns makes her output even more remarkable. Her ability to productively produce genius leaves me intimidated and grateful in equal measure. I circled for days about how to write this “letter” about a book I cannot stop giving to anyone who might read and appreciate it. When I read it in one big gulp last fall, I annotated it as if I was composing a response to my most inspirational teacher. It felt so new and fresh and so badly needed – particularly now. I very much remain, like that moment in the early fall of 2018 when I finished Sullivan’s call to all to read Lepore, a deer in the headlights of one person’s brilliance.
If any of the following questions and remarks (each a prompt) interest you, I suggest you buy this book. It is long but is filled with prose that flies (refreshingly interspersed with well-chosen pictures and illustrations).
How “exceptional” is America in the grand scope of history and, if so, to what extent have we earned our “exceptionalism”? The book insists that the reader engage the glib very “unexceptional” maxim that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.
In a related question … have we lived up to the stirring declarations of our founding documents where the “truths” of political equality, natural rights and popular sovereignty are “self-evident”? To quote Lepore … “Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?”
Are you uneasy with the “blind veneration” of the Founding Fathers that James Madison asked us to avoid? While these men remain very much intact in this history, Lepore makes them real. She does not debunk them or patronize them with canonization. She suggests that while they might be overwhelmed by our present state, they would not be all that surprised.
While incorporating a variety of profoundly American themes, Lepore focuses primarily on the issue of race to address these and many more questions. To quote, again, from her Introduction, Lepore’s book is a brilliant effort to “study the past” in order to “unlock the prison of the present”. It is how history should be written and taught.
These Truths: A History of the United States
by Jill Lepore (2018)
789 pages before the notes