Our Times: America at the Birth of the Twentieth Century

Sullivan, a muckraking journalist, confidant of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford and a self-styled Progressive Republican, wrote a bestselling popular history of the United States covering the years 1900 to 1925 and published in six volumes between 1926 and 1936. CBS anchor Rather, author of four books, has abridged Sullivan's opus into a single hefty volume, adding a preface, a conclusion and a few section notes. Illustrated with 200 period photographs, political cartoons, drawings, ads and posters, Sullivan's robust chronicle is a stirring, lively saga of missed opportunity as America steps onto the world stage during WWI, then refuses to join the League of Nations, shirks its leadership role and retreats into the consumerism and isolation of the Roaring Twenties. Sullivan ably conveys the dizzying pace of change propelled by electricity, films, radio, railroads, automobiles, airplanes, advertising. His colorful account of American daily life is crammed with odd information on clothing styles, patent medicines, public amusements, dog ownership, popular songs. Roosevelt, Ford, Wilson, Andrew Carnegie, Upton Sinclair and John D. Rockefeller stride across a sprawling canvas that offers close-up views of the growth of Freudianism, public schooling, immigration, Sacco and Vanzetti, Hemingway, Sandburg, Mencken, the jazz age. (Dec.)