The Sum of Our Dreams

A Concise History of America

By: Louis P. Masur

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

In The Sum of Our Dreams, Louis P. Masur offers a sweeping yet compact history of America from its beginnings to the current moment. Evoking Barack Obama's belief that America remains the "sum of its dreams", Masur locates the origin of those dreams - of freedom, equality, and opportunity - and traces their progress chronologically, illuminating the nation's struggle over time to articulate and fulfill their promise. Moving from the Colonial Era, to the Revolutionary Period, the Early Republic, and through the Civil War, Masur turns his attention to Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Age, World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two, the Cold War, Civil Rights, Vietnam, and Watergate, and then lays out clearly and concisely what underlies the divisiveness that has characterized American civic life over the last 40 years - and now more than ever. Above all, however, Masur lets the story of American tell itself.

Inspired by James Baldwin's observation that "American history is longer, larger, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it", he expands our notion of that history while identifying its individual threads. The Sum of Our Dreams will be the new go-to single volume for anyone wanting a foundational understanding of the nation's past and its present.

©2020 Louis P. Masur (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Excellent

I have a kind of hobby: collecting one-volume histories of America. There have been several of these lately, and this is one of the best. It is given an especially good reading by Jonathan Yen, who seems to have put in a bit of overtime trying to get the pronunciation right for a number of names that are often given incorrectly in audiobooks (at least in some that I've listened to). His narration is energetic, clear, and easy to listen to.

Masur has an interesting approach to structure. Each chapter is divided into five parts, each part focusing on a particular topic within that period. Some of those chapters cover a surprisingly large amount of ground. For example, the second chapter is broken down into the subheadings Revolution, Constitution, Political Parties, War of 1812, and Missouri Compromise. Not many histories of the US would try to cover all those topics in a single chapter, but Masur almost makes it work.

Almost. That particular chapter — the second one — points up one of two weaknesses I see in the book. On the whole it provides a strong survey-level introduction to US history, but its coverage of the Revolution and the events leading up to it is surprisingly weak. The Revolution almost seems to happen while the colonists are busy making other plans. In contrast, Masur gives an excellent account of the years leading up to and away from the Civil War: not surprising from someone who wrote the Oxford Very Short Introduction to that subject.

The arbitrary division of each chapter into 5 sections seems at first like a straitjacket, but it's really just a mnemonic device, and Masur keeps the focus soft enough within each subtopic to cover just about everything under the sun. For example, the section on Social Media, as you might expect, gets into Facebook, Twitter, and online games; but it also gets into the issues that were magnified by social media: Black Lives Matter, I Can't Breathe, and gay marriage rights; racial violence and mass shootings; and the growing movement to take down the remaining symbols of the Confederacy. The section on Globalization covers the growth of Apple and Microsoft, the personal computer revolution, and Amazon's domination of the retail market. I actually can't think of many important points about US history that aren't at least mentioned in the book.

There is one other weakness I found in the book, though, and that's Masur's handling of culture. As a lover of literature, I was disappointed in his almost complete neglect of the subject. John Steinbeck gets a relatively full discussion (full, obviously, given the space constraints of a short history like this), but Hemingway gets only a single sentence — and Faulkner nothing. Mark Twain puts in an appearance as an anti-imperialist and political activist, but Huckleberry Finn is only mentioned briefly in connection with the closing of the American frontier. Arthur Miller shares billing with Homer Simpson. J.D. Salinger gets his moment of fame, but Toni Morrison — who won the Nobel Prize — is left out: a curious omission for a writer who seems to be, in general, especially sensitive to issues involving Native Americans and people of color.

Still, compromises obviously have to be made for a book like this, and I can't really fault Masur because he didn't make the same ones I would have made. He's very strong on politics, and I found his narrative of the second half of the 19th century — which has always been a murky period for me — enlightening and helpful. I would definitely recommend the book, either as an introduction to the subject or as a quick and entertaining review.