Customer Reviews

The Americans: The Colonial Experience

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I love to read American history and Daniel Boorstin is one of the best. After reading this book, I had a much better understanding of the American colonial experience. I also understood to a greater degree the affects that Christianity has had on our culture. In this book, Boorstin compares three colonies. It is interesting to read the cultural differences. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the origins of our nation.

This is a young work of Boorstin and even years later it still lives up to its greatness. The first book of a trilogy, it sets the tone for the two to follow. We are not given a dry reading of dates and places and wars and settlements. Instead it is a readable story of movements, nations but most the individuals - both known and unknown - whose influence continues with us to this day.

This mix of biographies and historical happenings makes for an enjoyable, entertaining and enlightening work.

This is an excellent work. That said, you should know what you're looking for when you pick it up. If you are trying to find a history textbook to give you a factual synopsis of the major events in American history, this is not it. This book reads like a collection of essays on different policital, cultural, and intellectual trends in Colonial America.

Like any other collection of opinions, there is plenty of room for disagreeing with some of Boorstin's analysis and conclusions. Still, he supports his positions well, and the book is packed with insights that will expand your understanding of colonial America.

This work is well written, and readable, but you will probably get a little more out if it if you already have a solid background in American history. In any case, it would be highly worth your while to pick up.

Boorstin, one of the leading American historians, has written a riveting series on this country's early development. Told in such an engaging manner that you will find it hard to put down, he gives you the real story, warts and all, of how we came to be a nation. Not the rah rah breastbeating of your typical junior and senior high textbooks and avoiding any incursions of political correctness, this series should be read by all Americans.

This portrait of different aspects of colonial American social and governmental tendencies is a very interesting read. Mr. Boorstin's theses are well supported with historical information. His arguments made me reexamine some of my preconceptions about the colonial period and consider in a new light the impact of early American history on the present. That said, the author is not the most scintilating writer among historians. Also, the book ends abrubtly without a summary chapter, which would have been useful. It appears Boorstin performed surgery on a larger _The Americans_ work, slicing it in thirds, without gathering up the entrails and applying a suture.

Boorstin outlines the fundamentals and development of American consumerism and capitalism of the 19th Century. A great read for understanding why America was the great attraction of emigration. A good emphasis is put forth on how much American ingenuity happened by accident. This book is excellent for describing who we are, how we dressed, how we ate, and how we profited from it. Like the rest of Boorstin's works, this is a must for any student of history!

Once again Boorstin has demonstrated his brilliant analytic historical vision. This book is a well documented presentation of the factors and characteristics of the colonial experience. It gives us an idea of how we came to be Americans and who we are. It is heart warming to read such a well written yet scholarly book.

A great book yes - in the original paper versions. But the Kindle edition is so poorly and sloppily formatted that it's almost unreadable.

Quotes that are formatted as indented blocks of text in the original (paper) versions (Boorstin does this a lot - quoting religious texts, poems, long passages from original sources) are flushed to the left margin in the Kindle version, so there's no visual cue to distinguish between the quoted text and the main narrative - it's just not clear when Boorstin is speaking vs. some other source.

The problem is confusing and disrupts what Boorstin intended to be published.

It's not clear if this is Amazon's problem or the publisher's (Random House), but after four months of repeated complaints to Amazon (they say they have been contacting Random House), these problems have still not been resolved in the Kindle version currently being sold by Amazon.

Apparently, faithfully reproducing an author's intent is not a priority for either company in their electronic book conversions.

I think "thescalpel" wrote a very useful and accurate review of this book, so I won't say as much about it as I normally would other than to say that I consider this book an outstanding example of intellectual and cultural history. If you first read a book that covers the historical events of colonial America, you'll find this book very interesting and enjoyable.

Unfortunately, I cannot yet whole-heartedly recommend a single book on American colonial history. I read "American Colonies: The Settling of North America" by Alan Taylor from 2002 and think it is a good book but do not think it covers essential historical events within the original 13 colonies fully enough; the problem is that Taylor gives too much space to colonizations that occurred in other regions of North America such as Mexico, the Pacific Coast, and Alaska. Everything he writes is interesting but is not really relevant to understanding the history of the early United States.

I searched Amazon today and found "Colonial America: A History, 1565 - 1776" by Richard Middleton. This appears to be a high school or college textbook originally written in 1992 but currently in its third edition printed in 2002. Looking at the table of contents, it seems that this book might be better focused on colonial U.S. history than Taylor's book; one thing that appeals to me is that he provides some of the British political and economic history which are important backgroud to understand why people emmigrated to America and why the Americans ultimately declared independence from Great Britain. On the other hand, the fact that his first sentence refers to "the European invasion of North America" strikes me as excessively politically correct; while the colonization of North America by Europeans was ultimately tragic for the Native Americans, I find the word "invasion" too strong. But I think I might actually buy his book and read it anyway.
One last note: it appears that many of the negative reviews of this book are by high school students who were forced to read it. If you discounted their reviews, I think this book would have an average rating of 4.5 or 5 stars. I have not yet read the two sequels by Boorstin but plan to do so.

I was assigned to read this book for AP History over the summer. There is a lot of interesting and accurate information in this book, however, at some points there is far too much inforamtion and the book seems to have a very dry effect. It should be read little, by little so you have time to absorb all the information thrown at you.