Book Review: The Sum of Our Dreams by Louis Masur
Louis P. Masur’s three-hundred-something page history of the United States is positioned as an introductory text, ‘a foundation of knowledge’ (xvii). All the familiar faces put in an appearance, from John Smith to Frederick Douglass; Horatio Alger to Martin Luther King Jr. Masur quotes Benjamin Franklin on death and taxes, Neil Armstrong on small steps and great leaps, and Gordon Gekko on the goodness of greed. He lingers on the Founding Fathers, on Lincoln, on the two Roosevelts, on Nixon, on Trump. In the four hundred and thirty years this book covers, the only women who receive more than passing mention are Harriet Beecher Stowe and Hilary Rodham Clinton.