American
Beyond Our Grandest Notions
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From Chris Matthews, former host of MSNBC’s Hardball and NBC’s The Chris Matthews Show, and New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, and Tip and the Gipper, comes a definitive work on the lifeblood of America—its enduring spirit.
People have often wondered what makes America truly great. With a citizenry of vastly different races, religions, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds, what intangible bond unites and defines us as "Americans"? In his own inimitable style, Chris Matthews offers a portrait of a country born of contradictions. We are a people reluctant to fight, who become ferocious when threatened or attacked. We are a deeply practical nation, yet we stand as the world's great optimists. Inherently suspicious of governmental power, we still embrace our flag in times of danger. Fiercely independent, in love with freedom, and eager to face the future, we are like no other people on earth.
Matthews asserts that our greatest strength is a set of distinct notions that comprise our national character. The self-made man. The reluctant warrior. The lone hero. We celebrate them in our popular culture and throughout our history, from 1776 to 9/11. In American, Matthews explores the best America stands for and portrays our country as a beacon for the modern world—unafraid of challenges, moving ever forward, and ready and willing to prevail.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
TV pundit Matthews invokes a kaleidoscope of cultural icons, including Lincoln, Bogart, Hemingway, Oprah and the Don't Tread On Me rattlesnake in this giddy, slapdash, intermittently coherent love letter to"American-ness." Matthews boils down this broad idea into some basic--and sometimes contradictory--precepts. Americans, he says, are pugnacious but anti-militaristic; they admire gun-slinging loners and heroic men of action, but love the little guy and underdogs; they are optimists with a manifest destiny and an eye for personal reinvention. Matthews's analysis rarely goes beyond hagiographies of celebrities and politicians and ardent appreciations of movies like Casablanca and Rocky (or in a darker--but still light--mood, Taxi Driver, whose psychotic hero is an"oddly comforting figure from our frontier past" possessed of an"edgy generosity" and"readiness to give all"). Some claims are suspect: that Americans"reject the dandified haberdashery of war," for instance, might come as news to legions of Civil War reenacters. The volume's vaguely populist centrism nods benignly at Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, at pro-gun and pro-choice sentiments, at Vietnam War POW John McCain and Vietnam War draft-dodgers, all of whom partake of our transcendent national essence. His Whitmanesque embrace of contradictions papers over great fissures in American politics and society, but that is precisely the point of Matthews's positive, chest-thumping thesis: it's all good. Photos.
