This Week's Good Book: America Reborn - A Twentieth-Century Narrative in Twenty-six Lives - by Martin Walker

The author presents a narrative of the outgoing American century through individual portraits of 26 of its most influential participants. Beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and concluding with Bill Clinton, Walker's portraits are less biographical than they are temporal. Each chapter takes a well-known individual as a paradigm for a larger development ("Emma Goldman and the American Dissident," "Lucky Luciano and the American Criminal," etc.). The early chapters are essentially recapitulations of received wisdom: for instance, Henry Ford invents mass production and realizes he must also create a mass consumer class, hence the five-dollar day for his workers. This is an interesting history of the 20th Century using biography as a format for enlightening the reader about larger issues. Some of the biographies include Woodrow Wilson, Babe Ruth, William Boeing, Winston Churchill, Katherine Hepburn, John Steinbeck, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King and Billy Graham.