John

Not an absolutely terrible book, but reading it just a year after reading Albion's Seed exposes the weakness of Woodward's in comparison. The former is much more rigorous and thorough in it's approach, while the latter's only advantage is the wider breadth of nations covered. The author also eschews any effort to hide his ‘Northern Alliance' bias and uses the last third of the book to rant about Southerners, of which much of it is comically naive in hindsight. I'm sure this book was a hit with the Jon Stewart Daily Show-era libs that would have read it at the time.