SOURCE: “Just So,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 8, 1998, p. 4.

In the following review of A History of the American People, Wright finds shortcomings in Johnson's characterizations of certain key figures, particularly Franklin D. Roosevelt, but concludes that Johnson provides “a vivid and highly readable portrait of the way in which the United States has emerged.”

Paul Johnson is brave and bold, comprehensive and versatile: brave and bold, in that he writes a 900-page single-volume history of the United States without having studied its history at school (Stonyhurst) or university (Oxford) where, in any case, in his day no American history was taught. The book [A History of the American People] is comprehensive in that its history is a reinterpretation of the American story from the first settlements to the Clinton administration, covering politics, business and economics, immigration, the commercial aspects of slavery, the growth of cities...