By Jay Parini
During this full of life exploration of America’s highbrow historical past, acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Jay Parini celebrates the existence and instances of 13 books that assisted in shaping the yank psyche.
Moving nimbly among the nice watersheds in American letters—including Walden, Huckleberry Finn, The Souls of Black Folk, and On the Road—Parini demonstrates how those books entered American lifestyles and changed how we expect and act on the earth. An immensely readable and colourful paintings of cultural heritage, Promised Land exposes the wealthy literary beginning of our tradition, and is bound to attract all publication enthusiasts and scholars of the yankee personality alike.
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Extra info for Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America
Sample text
Morton squabbled with his business partner, and the latter took off for Virginia, leaving Morton and his merry band to enjoy themselves. And apparently they did. According to Bradford, “They fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness” (227). ” Indeed, Morton had traded alcohol (these early settlers drank brandy and aqua vitae) and guns for furs, and 22 PROMISED LAND so it was perhaps economic competition as much as anything else that spurred the Plymouth settlers into action.
These are God’s chosen people, after all, not unlike the tribes of Israel in the Old Testament. God keeps an eye on them, and they wear a kind of protective shield as long as they behave according to His will. Indeed, Bradford ends this chapter with a number of direct quotations from Deuteronomy and the Psalms, lending an aura of historical necessity to his narrative. God is with His people, Bradford is saying. Let those who come later understand that the Pilgrims “cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity” (71).
Jay stepped aside after No. 5, but was brought back to elaborate on treatymaking powers of the Union in No. 64. Here he maintains that the president himself cannot, and must not, have the power to make war or create treaties. Two-thirds of the Senate must agree with the president on these crucial matters. Importantly, Jay emphasizes that both the president and the senators should be mature men (over thirty-five if president, over thirty if senator) distinguished by their disinterested virtue. He warns fiercely against being “deceived” by those who exhibit “genius and patriotism,” traits that “like transient meteors, sometimes mislead as well as dazzle” (389).
