Paul Johnson: The History of

The American People

This book by Paul Johnson is very informative, and can be very useful for the reader. However, it is a bit biased and includes some of Johnson's personal opinions, so you can't trust the book (or any other source of information) totally. Being from an English writer, it could even be biased against the Americans if Johnson had a particular dislike for American people, but not in this case, the book can be very helpful and educational.

The book, `The History of the American People' can be very reliable, because it was written by a very good, professional and famous historian, who has written lots of other good history books. It contains lots of important facts about America's history, and about Woodrow Wilson, his fourteen points, about the League of Nations and Wilson's idea that it was perfect.

An example that Paul Johnson uses his personal opinion in the book is this quote "Wilson's increasingly cloudy rhetoric." And "There is nothing like war to shatter utopian illusions." In these quotes, Johnson is saying what he thinks about Wilson's ideas, how he thinks, he criticizes Wilson's ideas by giving his personal opinion of that. It is one of the things that make the book a little bit biased.

In the book, Johnson generalizes things very much, for example "The younger Americans were particularly bitter." He is saying that for a fact, all the young Americans were bitter, instead of saying `most of the Americans' or `the majority of them'. We know that not ALL the Americans were bitter.

Paul Johnson didn't have much purpose to write this book. In my opinion the main reason for him to write this book is for the money and a bit of the fame. He must be a very well known writer because he has written some other books, so people already know who he is and that may be an impulse to buy his book. He doesn't make the book too hard to read, so any person who buys it can read it.

This book can be very useful, so it has a good value, however there is a limitation, it is only about the American history, and it only goes as far as Paul Johnson's knowledge and thoughts of the American history.