I've been familiar with Bill Kauffman's columns for some years now in The American Conservative magazine (and he's in large part the reason I read the magazine in the first place), but his AmCon writing is somewhat spotty to me. I loved, for example, his cover-story interview with George McGovern several years ago ("Come Home, America: Why the Democrats Need a New George McGovern, and Why the Republicans Could Use One Too"), but some of his regionalism (his baseball stuff and that sort of thing) is just a little too, well, regional for me. :-)

This is the first of his books that I've read, and my feelings about it mirror his columns. I particularly loved the chapters on Dorothy Day and Carolyn Chute (as to Chute, I have a particular interest in Maine regional writing), and I very much liked the chapter on Eugene McCarthy and Pat Moynihan, but some of the others were take-it-or-leave-it for me, hence the three stars. That's probably, though, to be expected of a book like this, which is more a collection of essays than a serially progressing work. Some chapters you'll like, some you won't, and YMMV. ( )

Quite an engaging book about uniquely American cultural and political figures and the values of independence, localism and personalism. I disagree with Kauffman on quite a few particulars, but I enjoyed the book. He comes across as curmudgeonly and madly in love with America -- not in a large scale nationalist imperialist way, but in a profoundly moving attachment to place kind of way. He looks at some incredibly fascinating figures, never neglecting their less-than-flattering characteristics, but also not rejecting their legacy simply because of their lack of "perfection," ideological, moral or otherwise. ( )