America Reborn: A Twentieth-Century Narrative in Twenty-Six Lives

As the title suggests, British journalist Walker (The Cold War: A History, etc.) views history through the prism of biography in his engaging, though sometimes superficial, chronicle of the U.S.'s political, social and economic development over the course of the 20th century. Each chapter takes a well-known individual as a paradigm for a larger development (""Emma Goldman and the American Dissident,"" ""Lucky Luciano and the American Criminal,"" etc.). The early chapters are essentially recapitulations of received wisdom: for instance, Henry Ford invents mass production and realizes he must also create a mass consumer class, hence the five-dollar day for his workers. When the choices are not conventional, they can be arguable: Katharine Hepburn is hardly a typical Hollywood star, and using Winston Churchill (whose mother was American) as a way of examining ""the American diaspora"" (whose meaning is never satisfactorily clarified) simply doesn't work. As the narrative approaches the 1970s, when Walker began reporting in the U.S., it sharpens considerably. Particularly strong is the chapter on Richard Nixon, in which Walker argues that the most important of the ""three strategic disasters that marked his presidency"" was neither Watergate nor the fall of Saigon but Nixon's decision to abandon the gold standard and devalue the dollar, which led to the ghastly inflation of the '70s and the resulting triumph of Reaganomics in the '80s. Throughout his accessible text, the author also does a good job of tracing his main theme, the nation's century-long struggle to deal with Americans' ambivalence about international involvement. There's little new here, but Walker's lively popular history is generally informative and appealing. 26 photos. (May)