Rating: 
Summary: America: Greatest of Human Adventures
Review: This is a superb historical narrative, authored by a gifted writer and an immensely talented, conservative historian who has an abiding faith in and respect for America: "It is," concludes Johnson, "still the first, best hope for the human race." Johnson weaves outstanding scholarship, keen historical insight and analysis, and, yes, personal wisdom, into an historical text that reads like a novel, yet is bursting with more facts than an almanac (his source notes alone run to over 90 pages). Caution: Johnson's masterfully articulated but politically incorrect views (the engine within his story) will provoke, anger -- or possibly persuade -- readers subscribing to more liberal interpretations of American history.
Rating: 
Summary: poorly edited
Review: The edition of this book that I read (1997, paperback) was fascinating, but poorly edited. It is refreshing to read about the U.S. from an outsider's perspective and I found the text engaging in that regard. However, it is full of countless typos that should have been caught by any self-respecting copy editor. That so many copy-editing errors were allowed to slip by makes me wonder whether the book was properly fact-checked as well, and if the other reviewers here are correct, it sounds like it wasn't.
Rating:
Summary: A book that makes United States History INTERESTING
Review: I really enjoy reading this book. It connects all the textbook facts into themes while adding interesting little tidbits that keep your attention. While definitely not the final word on everything, I adamently recommend this book for supplementary reading.
Rating:
Summary: Learn American History Enjoyably
Review: Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People" is written for the American people. And, like his other books, this 900 page volume is beautifully written.Being an immigrant, I was not formally taught the history of America, and until I read Johnson's book, I did not have a good understanding of the history of this great country. This book is splendidly done! Johnson chooses his material with shrewdness, does his research with care, and presents it with a fair mind despite his ideology. Whether or not you have had high school or freshman American history, this book will enrich you with a cohesive presentation of American history. You also get the benefit of the analysis, evaluation and interpretation of people, events, conflicts, and epochal transitions by a historian of the highest caliber.
You will get to see a little of the imperfections of even the most revered of our leaders, but you will also see how these leaders courageously steered the course of the country at important junctures, politically, militarily, economically, and culturally, and made this country what it is today. And be proud to be an American.
Rating:
Summary: At Last: An Honest US History
Review: Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Mr. Johnson's history is the explosion of three myths. First, that Thomas Jefferson was a great American. Second, that Warren Harding was the prototypical immoral man. Finally, that FDR was a hero with his New Deal. In addition, Mr. Johnson's history is very accurate both in its division of American History into periods and in the various elements of each period. I recommend this to all interested.
Rating: 
Summary: "He who does not add, subtracts."
Review: .
I have recently discovered that this book is vastly overrated. In fact, I would now label it "trash." It sat mostly unopened on my shelf since its publication, until a footnote in another book I was reading caused me to follow its reference to the Johnson book. Writing about Thomas Jefferson, Johnson says: ... From claret to concubinage, there was no delight
... he did not sample, or rather indulge in
... habitually. (p. 242) ... So Jefferson's wife was in intimate daily contact ...
... with her husband's concubine. (p. 242) ... Jefferson's expensive tastes might not have proved
... so fatal to his principles had he not also been an
... amateur architect of astonishing persistence and
... eccentricity. (p. 244) ... It is just as well that Jefferson had no sense of
... humor: he constitutes in his own way an egregious
... comic character, accident-prone and vertiginous, to
... whom minor catastrophes accrued. (p. 246) ... As originally built his bedroom [at Monticello]
... accorded him no privacy at all, a curious oversight
... considering he had a passion for being alone and
... unobserved. Thereafter the search for privacy became
... an obsession in the many changes of design ...
... Contemporaries assumed they were there so his alleged
... mistress, Sally Hemmings, could slip in and out of his
... chamber unobserved. (p. 247) Now whatever one thinks of the supposed affair between Jefferson and Hemmings, and I believe it to be complete and utter BS, it is hard to get around the fact that Jefferson's wife died when Sally Hemmings was not yet nine years old. Suggesting that Martha Jefferson was in "intimate daily contact with he husband's concubine," is alone sufficient to disqualify Johnson as a serious historian. I tried to follow some of Johnson's footnotes, but found them either irrelevant or dead ends for me. (My personal library does have its limitations.) As for the "contemporaries" description of Jefferson's quarters, I would offer: ... His apartments had no private entrance not perfectly
... accessible and visible to all the household. No female
... domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when
... he was known not to be there, and none could have
... entered without being exposed to the public gaze. This is from a letter written in 1858 by a Jefferson granddaughter. ... Regarding the snide comments like "amateur architect," well I guess Johnson never visited the University of Virginia. Why would he have wanted to? There are scholars there.
Rating:
Summary: A History of the American People
Review: Absolutely the best history book I have ever read. Totally engrossing!
Rating: 
Summary: a reader
Review: Why do so many reviewers write about how this is a "right-wing", Republican history when the author in fact praises Democratic presidents such as Andrew Jackson, James K Polk, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman while critizing Republicans like US Grant, William McKinley, and Dwight Eisenhower. Besides, his critizism of FDR and JFK are likely to become more mainstream as the events move into the distant past and those academics who remember these men personally or first-hand begin to die off. Upon objective interpretation of the facts in hind-sight, these left-wing giants do not look so wonderful. And, while acknowledging Reagan's importance and charm, the author does portray Reagan to be an airhead. This book seems to be a rather even handed history, only appearing right-wing because most historians take a left-wing point of view.
Rating:
Summary: A fair view of the U.S. by an outsider: 4.5 stars
Review: was good insofar as it
avoided politically correct fashion, and it was refreshing to hear
the story from someone on the outside, with no vested interest
in any particular group or race. It was
uncommonly admirable in how he consistently spotlighted the import of Christianity in the founding/sustaining of the nation. What
other popular contemporary historian comes close to this achievement? Few if any,
now that Christianity has been systematically banished
from our culture by the left-wing academia. He did however perpetuate the now carved-in-stone myth ("lie" to be
perfectly blunt -- see Thomas DiLorenzo's
in case you wish to denounce me as an iconoclast) of Lincoln as saviour rather
than destroyer, even though he knew perfectly well that
Lincoln started the War of Northern Agression regardless of the
intention of ending slavery. I can excuse Johnson on the grounds
that he is English; not American. Another Catholic European --
Pope Pius IX -- a lot closer to the situation though, knew exactly what
was at stake: he sent Jefferson Davis a symbolic crown of thorns.Leftists and liberals will
squirm with discomfort over Johnson's history, since
it refuses to join the bandwagon of today's intellectual climate
that dogmatically assails whites and men as the enemy,
while minorities are trotted out as sacrificial
victims for every evil under the sun. He also
valiantly defends (without ever overlooking his faults)
Richard Nixon, a man whose supposed debauchery
has been so deeply engrained in our minds as to render impossible
even accepting him as human. Likewise Johnson
devastates the falsehood of JFK's legacy that
the liberal media deliberately overlooked. Despite the rare misconception
(as stated above regarding Lincoln), Johnson steps back, tells
the truth, and lets the chips fall where they
may. His greatest virtues are his outsider standpoint and his
Christian orientation, both of which make this book
worth reading for Americans
who want to see their country from a keener perspective
than that which pervades other popular books on the subject. I give it 4.5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful epic with mistakes along the way
Review: I always hated American history classes in high school and college. It just seemed like one damned political argument after another...tarrifs, acts, bills, administrations...blah, blah, blah. My opinion changed after reading this highly entertaining and fast paced account of our history. There it is: warts and all. But how splendid and magnificent. It is not generally understood just how wealthy this nation was right from the beginning. As far back as 1750, the American standard of living was pulling ahead of the rest of the world, especially among yeoman farmers. The cast of characters is also very lively. You know the names, but their individual behaviour is marvelous to behold on the canvas of history. My biggest complaint is that Johnson gets his facts wrong in many places, especially when it comes to the War Between the States. He gets General Albert Sidney Johnston confused with General Joseph Johnston...with Old Joe getting killed at Shiloh!! Egad. He then states that R. E. Lee was of wealthy descent. Patently untrue. Lee's father left his family destitute and the young R. E. Lee was shuttled about between relatives. When he was sixteen, he had to seek a military career because he had no other means to support himself. There are other irritating details that flaw this book throughout, but on the whole his superb portraits of Lincoln, Jackson, Truman and other presidents along with men of culture like Emmerson is a skillfully accomplished measure of the writer's craft. His incisive portraits of post-World War II presidents are highly entertaining and informative. Those of us who lived through those years don't realize how much we missed. Johnson, an Englishman, gives us an unusual and absorbing glimpse into the great history of a mighty nation.
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