Hidden in Plain View Thursdays

The Americans: The Democratic Experience

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Welcome to the weekly feature where we use Random.org to pick a book from our library shelves (real or virtual) and bring it out into daylight.  To join in:
1. Pick a random book from your library and tell us:

• title, author, #of pages, edition, (tags, and collections if LT)
  
• why that book is in your library
• whether you've read it or not
• if so did you like it and why;
• if not, do you plan to read it?
• how and when you acquired the book
• Be sure to leave us a link to your post so we can compare notes.
  

This weeks pick from pg #2, book #54 of the your library collection, is Daniel J. Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience, Vintage Trade Paperback, 736 pages of which 136 are bibliographic notes and index.  We have this in our library, having inherited it from auntie in 2001.  It is tagged "history, to be read, and Pulitzer".  

I haven't read it yet, and just discovered as I researched this book and went to look at reviews, that it is actually the 3rd in a series Boorstin did on "The Americans".  The 1st two were The Americans: The Colonial Experience, and The Americans: The National Experience.  I'm going to have to find these two because I have a feeling I'm going to want to read them in order.  Can't believe Auntie didn't have the other two, and I suspect they are residing on one of those 65 boxes in the attic.  Seems like next week may become dedicated work in the attic week.  Boorstin's reputation is enough to make me want to read these even if it hadn't won the Putlizer, but that's a double bump up on the TBR list.Anyway, here's the description from Amazon:

Daniel J. Boorstin describes a post-Civil War America united not by ideological conviction or religious faith but by common participation in ordinary living: "A new civilization found new ways of holding men together--less and less by creed or belief, by tradition or by place, more and more by common effort and common experience, by the apparatus of daily life, by their ways of thinking about themselves." This is not a familiar litany of names, dates, and places, but an anecdotal account that rises far above impressionism and paints a compelling portrait of the United States as it climbed to new heights. Sheer reading pleasure for lovers of history, this fittingly ambitious conclusion to the Americans trilogy won the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1973. --John J. Miller

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)