KEY POINTS:
Ronald Wright's last book was A Short History of Progress, a succinct, compelling look at the cumulative trends of 10 thousand years of human history. Not many popular historians can claim to be simultaneously exhilarating and spine-chilling, but Wright, with his penetrating eye, his gift for synthesis, his sweeping perspective and his deep pessimism for the future, managed to pull off both.
It's a hard act to follow, so perhaps Wright can't be blamed if his new book seems like something of a damp squib. Subtitled "a short history of the new world order", it surveys the impact and consequences of "history's 'Big Bang' - the collision of worlds that began in 1492", when Europeans landed in the Americas.
Readers of A Short History of Progress will remember Wright's culminating argument that our current international economy, and the industrial age which gave rise to it, were made possible first by the food crops, and second by the gold and silver that European invaders pillaged from the Americas. "The world we have today is the gift of the New World ... Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet."
What Is America? expands on this argument without really extending it: that is, it takes us through a far more detailed examination of how the indigenous American civilisations fell, and how the influx of economic and biological wealth enabled Europe to develop the technologies that led to the rise of the United States as a continental power.
The crucial players in this process were not human. They were microbes. Wright demonstrates convincingly that the myth of America as a vast virgin wilderness, waiting to be tamed, was deliberately crafted by the first generations of settlers. But "America was no virgin, she was a widow". Smallpox and other plagues decimated the native American populations, leaving their well-developed communities and farm lands for the settlers to seize on.
Anyone whose knowledge of American history was served up to them by Hollywood will find Wright's clear, beautifully written exposition of how the West was really won a sobering eye-opener. But this is not new ground, especially for readers of his earlier works.
Once he reaches more recent times, Wright abandons powerful restatements of facts most of us already know, and starts offering up glib platitudes about the internal divisions in today's America.
As he sees it, the frontier, "a westering zone of warfare and cultural exchange", shaped one of the two basic American mindsets, which he terms Backwoods America: the anti-intellectual, anti-authority, gun-crazed culture which gave us George W Bush. Enlightenment America, "descended from the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson", gave us the Marshall Plan, some great treasures of world literature and, lately ... not very much.
Really? There are two Americas, and one of them has its roots in frontier culture, and owns today's White House, and we'd all be better off if this were not the case?
Given the extent to which this book pillages its author's earlier work for its best ideas and avoids drawing original conclusions, it's hard not to see it as a potboiler project for a thinker who has yet to find his next grand challenge.
* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
What Is America?
By Ronald Wright (Text $37)
