Alan Brinkley – The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People

As a first year English language & literature student I had quite high expectations about my American history course, including the text book. Why? I knew absolutely nothing about American history. And so I decided that I would take this seriously and do my readings.

When I discovered that the book was a 900 page monster, I was not exactly happy. But as I started reading, I was actually surprised. Getting through the first chapter was a horror, but with each finished chapter the reading got easier. And even though the book seemed really complicated and demanding a lot of focus, these factors gradually disappeared and in the end I found the book even enjoyable.

The book is divided into chapters, each with its own subchapters. Along the sides of the text important names and keywords are given, which is very helpful for orientation. Each chapter has a summarizing conclusion and a list of sources/additional readings at the end. The book also has some appendices, unfortunately I only had the individual chapters. It’s very nice that the book doesn’t give you only “its” point of view on history but includes articles about how the perspective changed over time.

To sum it up – yes. I would recommend it. For those who have never heard anything about the American history and also for the ones who have but want to learn something more (also it's a very good one for increasing reading speed :). You probably won’t like all the chapters (I hated all the ones describing wars and the ones about Wild West – booooooring), but you can always skip the ones you don’t enjoy, right? Given that it’s not a compulsory reading, which was my case, well...