Sunday Books & Culture - Non-Fiction
David S. Reynolds' "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson."
Sunday Books & Culture is edited by Vanessa Sekinger
WAKING GIANT
by David S. Reynolds
First Published in 2008 by Harper
Hardcover copies available at Amazon for $14.94
Paperback copies available at Amazon for $15.99
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Reviewed by Martin Davis
Nativism, expansionist zeal, rapid urbanization, anti-immigrant fervor, heavenly-minded evangelicalism co-existing with stellar minds pushing the boundaries of American society, and a polarizing president who was either reviled or placed on par with the Almighty.
Sounds a bit like America today. Instead, it was America from 1815-1848. A period that included the rise of Jacksonian Democracy.
The parallels make it a worthwhile read. But not as a moralist story. Rather, as a piece of history that should remind us that people and events and seminal decisions occur against the backdrop of a society that is far too complex to reduce to simple conclusions.
This is what makes Reynolds’ analysis of Andrew Jackson and the age that bears his name a seminal study that continues to stand as a masterpiece of historical writing.
This book [Reynolds writes] suggests that Jackson had many deep flaws, but that there was also much to admire about him, including his strengthening of presidential power essential to maintaining the American Union in a time of escalating sectional cirses. His shortcomings reflected his era, as did those of other great leaders, from Jefferson the Lincoln. But understand Jackson, perhaps more than most leading Americans of his time, requires an ability to resist either vilification or veneration, to the see the man whole — his failings as well as his successes.
In Reynolds’ hands, the period 1815 - 1848 — an era that first wrestled with national identity in a world where the Founders were gone, and that could see the rising tensions that would lead to Civil War and yet find itself incapable of stopping it — is a robust, complex, and frenetic world that helps us to appreciate the bubbling arguments, creativity, tensions, and passions that rest just below the political narrative that even in tumultuous times fails to adequately capture the more-complex society it rests upon.
The best part of Reynolds’ book, however, may well be this. It is great history, that reads like a great novel. Readers are pulled, page by page, through the era that had to wrestle anew with the same question we continue to wrestle — what does it mean to be American.
Martin Davis is Editor-in-Chief of the Advance.
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