SOURCE: “Johnson's America,” in National Review, March 9, 1998, pp. 59–62.

In the following review, Lind offers a generally positive assessment of A History of the American People.

Although he might be horrified by the comparison, Paul Johnson reminds me of another British writer, H. G. Wells. Like Johnson, Wells was an amazingly prolific generalist who took it upon himself to bring order to chaos in vast realms of human experience and to pronounce his judgments with the Olympian certainty and infernal wit that only journalists and pundits are licensed to deploy. Also like Wells, who was too smart to be a consistent leftist, Johnson, a convert from the Left to the Right, strikes me as constitutionally incapable of acting as a spokesman for any orthodoxy.

For any other writer, a history of the American people would be a daunting, lifelong project. For Johnson—the author of, among other works, synoptic...