What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order [Hardcover]

Ronald Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2008

In the six years since 9/11, as the bush regime has squandered domestic solidarity and international goodwill, many of the archetypes and ideals with which we’ve traditionally framed the American enterprise now seem endangered, even hollow. This raises the question, has America ever been what it thinks it is? What Is America? goes to the heart of that inquiry. Ranging with dazzling expertise through anthropology, history, and literature, Wright reconfigures our self-perception, arguing that the “essence” of America can be traced to the foundations of our history-literally to the collision of worlds that began in 1492, as one civilization subsumed another-and exploring how these currents continue to shape our world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Kirkus"
"[Few] will have likely heard so charming an analysis of American depredations...An entertaining, highly tendentious account of where we've been and where we're headed."

About the Author

Ronald Wright’s other widely translated works include the highly regarded Time Among the Maya, Stolen Continents, and his novel, A Scientific Romance, a New York Times Book of the Year. He lives in Canada.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786720972
• ISBN-13: 978-0786720972
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A concise current comparative analysis of repetitive historical blunders, January 11, 2009

By 

John Grimsrud (Merida, Yucatan, Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (Hardcover)

Up to the minute refined excellence bounces the historical ball off the same old wall.
Glimpse into this must read compendium of timely thought with the following excerpts;

Page 38; For all its corruption, chaos and sclerosis, the Spanish Empire still holds the record as the longest-lived world-super power-exactly three hundred years from conquest of Mexico to Mexican independence.
Page 81; Nowadays, when individuals think that God is speaking to them, that they have been chosen for a greater purpose, that they are unquestionably right while everyone else is mistaken or evil, they are likely to be removed from society and treated for mental illness.
Page 82; At what point does one group's religious mission become a threat to other groups? It seems to me that the acid test for determining when a religious community had become a peril to itself and others is when it starts killing people on God's orders.
Page 82; The atrocities of medieval popes and kings had been committed under an overreaching theology formidable enough to persuade most people that Christ allowed his delegates on Earth to practice war, torture and ingeniously painful executions on His behalf. Protestants knew that was bunk, but were soon doing much the same themselves.
Page 107; America's wealth and freedom would build on the slaughter of one race and the enslavement of another.
Page 170; In the thirty years after 1870, white Americans took and settled more land than they had in the previous three hundred.
Page 191; The history of the United States is not a story of triumphant anti-imperial heretics. It is an account of the power of empire as a way of life, as a way of avoiding the fundamental challenge of creating a humane and equitable community or culture.
William Appleman Williams, 1980
Page 194; "Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."
Page 207, 208; The supposed "rights" of capital trump those of sovereignty, ecology, labour-and future generations. The economy has become tyranny. Unless trade agreements include tough environmental and labour standards (as they do to some extant within the European Union), capital will always seek out the dirtiest river and the most exploitable human being.
The quest for easy money is as old as money itself. But it is hardly surprising that the delusion of endless growth and the denial of natural limits have taken their most virulent form in the United States-in the culture forged on the frontier. "The very essence of the frontier experience," writes the naturalist Tim Flannery, "is to exploit [resources] as quickly as possible, then move on.
The world is less a home in which to live than a treasury to ransack, and the loot needn't be shared out fairly or even used wisely, because there will always be more somewhere else.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fair but not Great, March 24, 2009

By 

William R. Gimby (Atlanta GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (Hardcover)

The first 75% of the book is a good description of the founding of the New World, it's affect on Europe and the poor treatment of native Americans. Unquestionably there is an American myth of how the Country was carved out of wilderness. Setting the record straight is a useful exercise. Where the historical aspect of the book essentially comes apart, is in the final 25%; which is primarily devoted to bashing the right wing policies of Nixon, Regan, and the two Bushes. Although I essentially agree with the author's position, I think this recent history could have been better balanced and written in a less confrontational manner. Finally, his description of the rightwing element of American politics as "Backwoods America" as contrasted with "Enlightenment America", is a gross oversimplification and indicates a lack of a clear understanding of political contrasts in America today.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fast and easy access to facts., December 11, 2008

By 

Wojciech Langer (Toronto, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (Hardcover)

This is a devastating, crushing, sour, undeniable and sarcastic criticism of human race using example of conquest, colonization, wars and genocides that happened in South and North Americas.
I gobbled it down in two sessions. Truly embarrassing and depressing. Shame on you, long time gone Britons and Spaniards particularly, though author emphasizes that any nation, tribe or society is capable and willing to behave the same way when given a chance. Highly recommended - read it first, then go for "The Shock Doctrine" by Noami Klein and "Collapse" by Jared Diamond.