SOURCE: “The Big Picture,” in American Spectator, Vol. 31, No. 4, April, 1998, pp. 68–71.

In the following review, O'Sullivan offers a positive assessment of A History of the American People.

This is a history of one of the eight wonders of the modern world by the ninth. Before getting to the American people, let us quickly review Paul Johnson. A successful print and television journalist—at different times editor of the intellectual leftist weekly, the New Statesman, columnist for the fogeyish London Spectator, and hard-hitting, straight-from-the-shoulder columnist for the populist Tory Daily Mail—Johnson took up history in his middle years, at about the time most of us are taking up pension brochures. He has since written a history of the British people, a history of Christianity, a history of the Jews, a history of the modern world, and a history of the birth of modernity, relaxing in between by writing...