[Meacham] is effective as ever at writing history for a broad readership. A journalist and presidential biographer who won a Pulitzer for his life of Andrew Jackson, he has seen how American politics works close up, as most academic historians have not, yet he has remained uncynical. He is an adroit and appealing storyteller. While interested in providing a usable history with lessons for the present, he tries to judge the past on its own terms, resisting the easy moralizing that smugly elevates the right-thinking living above the thoroughly unenlightened dead. Yet he does not on that account pardon his heroes' serious shortcomings, whether it be Theodore Roosevelt's Anglo-Saxon imperialism or Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime order to intern Japanese-Americans.

05/07/2018
America’s centuries-long struggles about race, gender, and immigration are viewed through the lens of presidential calculation and convictions in this sonorous but shallow study. Vanderbilt historian Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power) examines presidential leadership on issues of civil rights and equality, from Ulysses S. Grant’s vigorous action to protect freedmen from Ku Klux Klan attacks during Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson’s moral and political dynamism in enacting civil rights legislation in the 1960s. In between, he surveys presidential vacillations that mirrored the nation’s contradictory moods: Theodore Roosevelt awkwardly married white supremacism with progressive stances on race and women’s suffrage; Franklin Roosevelt defended democratic values against fascism but allowed the racist internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; Eisenhower was largely missing in action in the fight against Joe McCarthy’s inflaming of anti-foreign sentiment. Meacham’s gracefully written historical vignettes don’t break new scholarly ground, but they do highlight patterns that resonate with today’s controversies over immigration and white nationalism. (In the 1920s, he notes, Klan membership numbered in the millions, and one nativist demagogue called for a “wall of steel” against immigration from southern Europe.) Unfortunately, Meacham’s focus on presidents as moral exemplars and embodiments of America’s political soul feels more like mysticism—and anti-Trump panic—than cogent analysis. Photos. (May)

Appalled by the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump, and shaken by the deadly white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in 2017, Meacham returns to other moments in our history when fear and division seemed rampant. He wants to remind us that the current political turmoil is not unprecedented, that as a nation we have survived times worse than this. . . . Meacham tries to summon the better angels by looking back at when America truly has been great. He is effective as ever at writing history for a broad readership. . . . [Meacham] is an adroit and appealing storyteller.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Gripping and inspiring, The Soul of America is Jon Meacham’s declaration of his faith in America. . . . Meacham, by chronicling the nation’s struggles from revolutionary times to current day, makes the resonant argument that America has faced division before—and not only survived it but thrived. . . . Meacham believes the nation will move beyond Trump because, in the end, as they have shown on vital issues before, Americans embrace their better angels. This book stands as a testament to that choice—a reminder that the country has a history of returning to its core values of freedom and equality after enduring periods of distraction and turmoil.”—Newsday

“Meacham tells us we’ve been here before and can find our way out, urging readers to enter the arena, avoid tribalism, respect facts and listen to history.”—The Washington Post

“This engrossing, edifying, many-voiced chronicle, subtly propelled by concern over the troubled Trump administration, calls on readers to defend democracy, decency, and the common good. Best-selling Meacham’s topic couldn’t be more urgent.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Meacham has become one of America’s most earnest and thoughtful biographers and historians. . . . He employs all of those skills in The Soul of America, a thoroughly researched and smoothly written roundup of some of the worst parts of American history and how they were gradually overcome. . . . Meacham gives readers a long-term perspective on American history and a reason to believe the soul of America is ultimately one of kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia. Finally, Meacham provides advice to find our better angels—enter the arena, resist tribalism, respect facts and deploy reason, find a critical balance and keep history in mind. He’s provided a great way to do it.”—USA Today

“This is a brilliant, fascinating, timely, and above all profoundly important book. Jon Meacham explores the extremism and racism that have infected our politics, and he draws enlightening lessons from the knowledge that we’ve faced such trials before. We have come through times of fear. We have triumphed over our dark impulses. With compelling narratives of past eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time and helps us appreciate the American soul: the heart, the core, and the essence of what it means to have faith in our nation.”—Walter Isaacson

A dual narration such as this one—with the author beginning and concluding the audiobook—can be tricky. The voice of the author settles independently on the listener. The tone of the work is carried on by the narrator. In this case, the hand-offs come off smoothly, and both author and narrator gracefully deliver the theme that we’ve been through dark times before (Alien and Sedition laws, the Civil War, the rise of the KKK, McCarthyism) and prevailed. Fred Sanders is a compelling narrator who brings these foundational American stories to life with admirable poise. He is especially good at reading famous texts as though they were new. His storytelling style enhances the meaning of Meacham’s prose. This is an audiobook to listen to, absorb, and contemplate. A.D.M. 2018 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

2018-04-30
An esteemed historian and author chronicles America's never-ending fight to live up to her ideals.In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a divided nation about the "the better angels of our nature." Lincoln's words failed to prevent civil war, but they serve as a template for the latest book from Pulitzer Prize winner Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, 2015, etc.). The author contends that throughout American history, presidential leadership and citizen activism have overcome "hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent" to "lift us to higher ground," particularly in relation to civil rights. Meacham provides a sturdy history of this steady but halting progress, primarily through the prism of presidential leadership. Thus, while Ulysses S. Grant effectively cracked down on the Ku Klux Klan, the post-1877 years featured the rise of Jim Crow and a renewed disenfranchisement of black voters. Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House and resisted pressure to remove a black female postmaster in Mississippi, yet he "shared the dream of Anglo-Saxon imperialism" and held "ideas of racial superiority." Indeed, it was not until the 1960s that President Lyndon Johnson's relentless advocacy and Martin Luther King Jr.'s courage combined to help secure the civil and voting rights of all Americans. Clearly, Meacham hopes that the struggles of the past will inspire readers to contend for America's soul by resisting the modern-day forces of fear and bigotry in the personae of Donald Trump and his supporters. Yet whether he is criticizing Trump's post-Charlottesville comments or fretting over the influence of the largely irrelevant contemporary Klan, the author is not fully convincing in his argument that Trump poses a dire threat to our hard-won rights and liberty.Meacham ably depicts our nation's struggles to live up to Lincoln's words, but he oversells the notion that the fruits of past efforts are at risk in today's America.