I needed a pick me up so I checked out Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels" from the library. I hoped it would give me some perspective on what's happening in our world today. I don't think it did what I expected.Meacham wrote this book to show that America has seen the current problems before and the country has always made it out the other side of each crisis. Racism, misogyny, fascism - our country has seen them all over and over throughout our history and each time we made it through.
This should have been encouraging to me but it wasn't. What I read was that racism, misogyny, fascism, and all the other evils have been beaten down over and over again and they just come back. We have never, truly defeated them. I finished this book a little bit more pessimistic. Sigh.
I gave this book four stars out of five on Goodreads. You can't knock a well written book because it exacerbated my pessimism.
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