(Norton)
There may be no better time than the present to refresh your understanding of American history, and there is, most certainly, no better guide than Jill Lepore. As the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of History at Harvard and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Lepore has a scholar’s grasp of the material and a writer’s gift for breathing life into it. So, though it’s a comprehensive account of our history from 1492 to the present, “These Truths” is not your high school textbook; it both edifies and entertains — as a good book should — by translating dry facts and figures into stories of people like us, for people like us. Furthermore, while “These Truths” is not a women’s history, nor does it have a strongly feminist perspective, that it is written by one of our nation’s most renowned historians who is a woman — worthy to note, if not to celebrate.
— Reviewed by Becky Dayton of The Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury.
 
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