I was listening to the BBC History Extra podcast and they interviewed Ms. Lepore about her new book. The interview was pretty engaging and the book sounds (from her perspective) really interesting. On Goodreads it’s well reviewed right now but Goodreads reviewers basically never review poorly.
Anybody here read this book and have thoughts? I’ve been interested in American history as of late but haven’t really known where to best start reading and this sounded like a good starter candidate.
Good things about These Truths: it's got solid research, good sources and excellent writing. It likes to deal with ideas and the debate of them- like the ones that got the American colonies into a Constitutional Republic, and later into a Civil War. It also brings into the narrative people who don't normally get much attention, and who are worth it: like the escaped slaves taking shelter with the British army during the Revolution, who Washington demanded be returned, and they were; ...or pathetically struggled not to be.
Defects- well, she ended up writing a very big book, in order to capture a lot of what she rightly saw as important, and even then she had to dump some things. She admits that there are plenty of gaps. Like the events of the actual Revolutionary War- if you want to read about any of those battles, forget it. Was she just sick of all the heroic violence in films, games?
Still, if you are looking for a place to start on American history, it's good. It's much more of a real People's History than Howard Zinn's.