Rating: 
Summary: Loewen's truth is breathtaking
Review: You know surprisingly little about American history. Yes, you do. As a man of white european descent, I could easily have taken much of this book as offensive. I chose not to, and it made all the difference. I opened up my eyes and learned some very disturbing things about the history of this country. If you want to keep your eyes closed and hate people that you have been taught to hate, do not read this book. Loewen seems resigned, however, to the fact that the truth will not help as many people as it upsets. James, keep writing, that may not be the case.
Rating: 
Summary: Biased Beyond Belief
Review: I picked up this book expecting an interesting read, and some debunking of the standard stuff we all learned. I expected to read about some of the white-washes that surely exist in history books, which are certainly written by and for the majority culture. What I didn't expect to find was a book-length diatribe against white Europeans. To hear the author tell it, white Europeans are responsible for just about all the ills in the world. So be advised, if you are, or are descended from, white Europeans, you are evil, plain and simple. Did you know that the concept of one culture dominating another is purely a European cultural concept? Oh yes, never anything like that among the noble Native Americans - they might have fought but they never dominated or conquered - according to the author. Also, we hear a great deal about the "Afro-Phonecians" who did all kinds of wonderful things before the Portuguese stole all the thunder. Nope, no European ever did anything right or good. (And did you know that the Chinese were paragons of religious freedom?)It was a struggle for me to get through this book. I kept hoping he'd get off his vicious, sarcastic, racist attacks against a whole group of people, but he never did. The author has the ability to write an interesting book, but he is grinding an ax at least as large as the books he decries.
Rating: 
Summary: As biased as the books it critiques
Review: Loewen's book is an important work of iconoclasm. What a pity then that he indulges in the pet project of pc critiques: Christianity-bashing. Unlike any other religion in this work, Christianity is accorded no respect, only disdain. It is the tool of cultural imperialism, its preachers "thunder" racist sermons from the pulpit, and its Native American proselytes are all forcibly converted---God forbid one or two of them might have believed the gospel! In displaying such a virulent anti-Christian bias, Loewen reveals his own hypocritical scholarship to be as prejudiced and subjective as the textbooks he assails. Moreover, while devoting chapter after chapter to the subject of multicultural critiques, Loewen superficially treats the history of labor and class in a chapter barely ten pages long. Perhaps like most bourgeois critics, he has as much stake in the capitalist system as the corporate bosses he half-heartedly calls to task. By focusing on race rather than class he avoids a serious cultural critique that would risk opening a dialogue on whether or not the American Way is really worth living.
Rating:
Summary: This is an important book.
Review: Finally, a book that makes American history interesting, only because it tells the truth! Some conservatives may criticize this book only because it dispels the false and harmful notion that this country was built primarily on the effort and intelligence of white men with honorable intentions. The book doesn't have any political agenda except to tell the truth. The author gives a realistic portrait, based on primary sources, of what has really happened in our country, the motives of the main players, and how those past events affect the way we live and view our country now. And plus the accounts in the book are riveting, sometimes heartbreaking, and give insight as to how historians actually study and draw conclusions about history. This book is definitely an exciting read that has kept me up at night trying to fend off sleep, itching the next day to tell my friends of what I've learned.
Rating:
Summary: Every American should read this book
Review: I actually learned American history through one of the textbooks that Loewen criticized. No wonder I found American history so boring, and as a non-white American, so excluding. Some may claim that Loewen has some "liberal" agenda. His only agenda it seems is to tell the comprehensive truth, and to expose the lies and falsehoods of the "conservative" agenda, whose promoters seem to want to keep up the illusion that this country was built on purely honorable motives and solely through the efforts of Western European descendants. For anyone who steadfastly holds to the idea that American history should help us love our country, ask yourself, what does it mean to truly love something? Does that mean to love through some blind devotion to myths and "heroes" whose faults we shove under the rug? Or to love by learning the truth and using that knowledge to make connections between the past and present so that we may make our country better today for all?
Rating:
Summary: A solution to voter apathy
Review: After many years of debate, the question of how to resolve American voter apathy is at hand! First, make reading this book mandatory for anyone who wants to vote. Second, make reading this book mandatory for anyone who would prefer NOT to vote. Finally, make reading this book mandatory for anyone who chooses to express an opinion about government or politics. This book challenged so many assumptions I unknowingly brought to bear that it was sometimes overwhelming and often exhilirating. The book rings with honesty and candor; it manages to be thoughtful and provocative without ever being pedantic or condescending. After thirty years of reading, I have a pantheon of books I consider best of class. Of the many hundreds of books I keep, the pantheon contains five volumes. "Lies my teacher told me" is the sixth.
Rating:
Summary: exposing the agenda behind history textbook errors
Review: First off, let me say that I loved this book because I love history, and I love seeing myths debunked and hidden agendas exposed, and controversy has never been a deterrent for me. That said, I hope you get the feeling this is not a book that everyone will love - it will wrankle some feathers because many will find their comfortable sterotypes exposed as heroic cardboard cut-outs obscuring real 3-dimensional people with egos, flaws, and ulterior motives. It is a fascinating look at history textbook errors through the eyes of a history professor who has learned that the motives of the author or publisher may affect the content of a history book far more than historical facts. The surprising part, to me, is how open the secret agenda of high-school textbook publishers really is. And this is really the crux of the matter - not the fact that Helen Keller was a socialist, or Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist, or Columbus thought nothing of torture or genocide to accomplish his ambitions. Of course, for textbook publishers, the profit motive is first and foremost, but related to it is this issue of building better citizens by means of propaganda which inspires loyalty. Textbook publishers seem to feel that history books are to incite young folks to fervent chauvenism, and truth and historical fact are expendable commodities in this noble quest. They openly admit that historical truth is not their objective! To me, this admission reverberates through the entire book, through the entire grade-school curriculum, through all of our collective memories and perceptions of the foundation teachings of our youth. Another very important issue this book confronts is the school textbook's negation of the cause/effect principle in human history, the unwillingness to look for reasons for unrest or protest or reactionary violence. Textbooks present history as a one-dimensional linear march of "great" men who just keep making the world better and better. The reality that is glossed over is that history is a complex series of power-shifts and reactions to a rich milieu of varied stimulants, and it is pointless to analyze an event or attitude without looking for the social/historical realities that spawned it. The book is filled with fascinating revisions of those trite historical stereotypes we all grew up with, and for this, and for the author's passion for his subject matter, I rate it a 5. However, it does have some flaws worth mentioning, to wit: It is heavily slanted toward Native American revisionism, whereas it does not deal with the overall subject in a balanced spectrum, and the language is sometimes overly stiff and scholarly (keep the dictionary handy while reading this one!). Like many, many others, I grew up thinking history was boring. What this book shows is that it's only the neutered, decaffeinated, lobotomized, sanitized, liposuctioned and implant-enhanced version that will bore you to tears - the dirt reality is as gripping and fascinating as Real Life with all it's warts showing, for after all, isn't that what history is REALLY made of?
Rating:
Summary: A must for students and teachers of U. S. History
Review: I won't lie, I love to read about American history. Lowen gives a witty and informative account of everything your U.S. History teacher got wrong. But it is not the teacher's fault...This book would also make a great aid to term papers, and a great conversation piece about what really happened the first Thanksgiving while you are carving the turkey. A really good read!
Rating:
Summary: Sound treatment of a serious issue
Review: Skimming over some of the many critical reviews of this book, it seems obvious that they prove at least one point Loewen is attempting to make. In sum, most of the criticisms lambast the author's "revisionism," "left or liberal agenda" and his attack on "national pride" or the "American ideal." (I also having a sneaking suspicion that if Loewen wrote a book that deconstructs the way that Iraq, Cuba or China present their history to youngsters all the same reviewers would give it 5-star ratings.) One of Loewen's central arguments is that history as an academic subject should NOT be about instilling patriotism or 'national pride' but critically analyzing past events - this does not necessarily mean the objective truth will ever be determined, as any honest university history professor will tell you. The negative reviews here show that those who did actually pay attention during their high school history classes were in fact imbued with a sense of national pride and a "correct" way of viewing U.S. history. This is why they object so much to Loewen's "revisionism," meaning his critical and honest treatment of the Christopher Columbus myth or his use of the Helen Keller example to show that the U.S. once had a strong, lively and popular socialist/worker's/social justice movement. Not that I agree with all of the gushing positive reviews either, but many do correctly point out that Loewen's approach would do a service to the teaching of US history because it would show how endlessly interesting and controversial that same history is. More importantly, such an approach would explain to students the underlying causes of so many of the negative aspects of American society that they undoubtedly see around themselves everyday. Such an understanding can possibly foster efforts to improve this situation, hardly an unpatriotic prospect. As an aside, I have to note that I found reading this book and the reaction to it quite fascinating, because it runs parallel to a debate that's been going on among university history professors, school teachers and public education officials in many former communist countries of Europe for the last decade. Namely, the big question is should history textbooks and the teaching of history be aimed at presenting a critical analysis of the past or instilling some sort of "patriotic values" - which it did in a different way under the former communist regimes, i.e. with an ideologically-driven Marxist approach. It's interesting, and a little sad I suppose, that such a debate is not restricted to "developing" or "transition" countries.
Rating:
Summary: bland negativism
Review: While I agree with the basic premise that high school history texts are too general and bland to be very interesting, I do not believe that they should be replaced with Loewen's version. Some of the other reviewers on this page have praised Loewen's use of facts. It's true. This book does swim with facts, some very unpleasant, but Loewen chooses which facts to include and which to leave out. And ultimately it's not his facts that he's so keen on inserting into the curriculum, it's his interpretations, which he doesn't always do a good job of supporting. The most outrageous sentence I recall from the book was when Loewen asserted in a single sentence that Davy Crockett et. al. died at the Alamo for no other reason than to defend the institution of slavery. This is the kind of provocative statement that would take a whole book to support, but Loewen lets it stand as undisputed fact. ... It's pretty clear that Loewen has a political agenda which is served by having Americans believe only the worst motives animated their ancestors. If you have to read this book, don't let it be the only one you read on American history. --This text refers to the Paperback edition
|
