This collection of Wood's reviews, with added afterthoughts, is a good survey of the state of American history writing over the past 30 years or so. Wood finds fault with pretty much every book, but his explanations usually make sense. It is refreshing to see inaccuracies pointed out, and it gives me confidence that when I read one of Wood's books, it will be better researched, thought out, and written than some of the books he takes on here. The best reviews in this volume provide a learning experience for the reader as Wood contrasts his views with those of the writer. The least interesting reviews here focus more on methods of teaching and Wood provides some egregious examples of the ridiculous academic pseudo-English some of these books are written in. Overall, I recommend this to readers with a deep interest in history who want to understand the various schools of thought that historians belong to. ( )

Only attempt if you are seriously ready to get your history geek on. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of book reviews spanning almost three whole decades; Gordon S. Wood is quickly becoming my favorite historian.

Being uninitiated to literary criticism in the magazine length format as these essays are, I am unsure if his critiques of historical offerings from 1981 to 2006 is boilerplate. At any rate, I was impressed with the thoughtful and well reasoned criticism produced by Mr. Wood. As of late, I have come to purchase books based upon their title or author, foregoing any reading of reviews or dust jacket synopsis to expand my exposure to all points of view. Before I opened this book I was unaware it was a collection of book reviews. The Purpose of the Past was anything other than an At the Movies thumbs-up/thumbs-down encapsulation of what each book was detailing regarding American Revolutionary history.

I came to appreciate this book for three distinct features.

First, it offered reviews of books I will unlikely come across. His reviews were contributions to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. As he explains in his introduction, these were penned for a non-academic audience in mind which leads me to my second observation regarding the benefit of this book: history lessons!

Secondly, it was a history book of the caliber Gordon S. Wood produces. When I realized this was an anthology of critical reviews my thoughts quickly lead me to discount this as a history book; I was wrong. To completely dismantle various authors' thesis which they mangled, got wrong, or used to rewrite history to achieve personal beliefs, Mr. Wood provides data and citations of his own work and others to dispute most of the books. He did enjoy, agree with and like a few of the books he reviewed, but for the most part he disagreed with either the goals of the author or the execution of reviewed books.

And lastly, it opened the world of sub-specialties within the historical writer's world. Like special practices physicians may choose, there are niches that academics favor. Mr. Wood clearly dislikes the closed-loop world of academia studies, and voices his disdain for the haughty monograph writing intended for other historians. In several earlier reviews he wrote his displeasure at reliance, almost as a proof of scholarship, of data and statistics needlessly filling up prose.

In the fourth essay, he is discussing Barbara W. Tuchman's offering. Wood writes: "She may not have a Ph.D., but she is as much of a pro as the professors are... She can communicate with a willing readership, which is more than the professors can do.... 'When you write for the public you have to be clear and you have to be interesting.'" He continues to list the "captive audience" academics have and equates this to not having to be marketable.

This passage of his lends credence to his accusation that graduate level history is too erudite to impress other academics; he forwards the idea that laymen are less interested in learning how many bushels of wheat were produced in a certain Pennsylvanian valley in 1692 or the annual income of a household in Virginian tidewaters, we want rip-roaring tales of war or evaluation of how politics shaped the Constitutional Convention.

In the same review he also elaborates on the different veins of history writing. "Unlike sociology or political science, history is a conservative discipline," he begins before explaining that unlike making assumptions of historical figures or events. When non-historians, or historians with ulterior motives, apply a 20/20 view of past events to explain present ideals, this no longer becomes a historical recount but becomes a vehicle for an agenda or reconstruction.

Contained in a reply to a letter from an author's book he reviewed (Richard K. Matthews; If Men Were Angels), he expounds upon his presumption. "Historians are as interested in the ideas and ideologies of the founders as political theorists like Matthews." To further clarify his point, he explains, "[h]istorians attempt to recover a past world as accurately as possible and try to show how that different world developed into our own." Conversely, political theorists work with an agenda in mind. "They are primarily interested in the present or future conditions of political life and see past ideas as merely the sources or seeds for present or future political thinking."

Finally, lamenting the change in the discipline of historical writing, Gordon Wood discusses The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 by Lester D. Langley as "comparative history." In later chapters he further reflects on Marxist influence and the attempt to document history through the lens of race, gender or class, eschewing "the dead white guy" paradigm. "For the most part, history is no longer designed to inculcate patriotism, build a national identity, and turn immigrants into citizens. Instead, many historians have begun to emphasizing racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, which has tended to dilute a unified sense of American identity." He does recognize that recent focus on less well-known figures has benefited the totality of America's historical knowledge, but to advance a political goal is detrimental to our identity.

What also is nice are the afterwords which accompany each review. Some are minimal and don't really offer any more insight, while others provide more reflection and occasional interaction with an unhappy author disagreeing with Wood's take on their book. ( )

This is a collection of book reviews written by the esteemed historian Gordon S. Wood. Many of them criticize history writers for presentism, post-modernism, political history, and scientific quantitative analysis. Coming under Wood's scrutiny are authors I admire such as Gary Wills, Barbara Tuchman, and Simon Schama. Yet despite this, I like Wood's well-written and well-supported take on how history should be told. Regardless of Wood's ultimate opinion of these works, there are a lot of books I want to add to my reading list. ( )

This volume, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections of the Uses of History (Penguin, 2008) collects twenty-one of Gordon S. Wood's essay-length book reviews, written over the past two and a half decades for the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Atlantic and other publications. With these essays Wood, one of America's most critically-acclaimed academic historians, offers little less than a thorough review of recent historical scholarship, with enhancements in the form of a thoughtful introduction and short afterwords appended to each essay.

One of the threads running through these selections is Wood's discomfort with the intrusion of literary theory into historical writing. He declares bluntly that "the epistemological skepticism and blurring of genres that seem to have made sense for some literary scholars had devastating implications for historians .... The result of all this postmodern history, with its talk of 'deconstruction,' 'decentering,' 'textuality,' and 'essentialism,' has been to make academic history writing almost as esoteric and inward directed as the writing of literary scholars. This is too bad, since history is an endeavor that needs a wide readership to justify itself" (4-6).

I couldn't agree more with this view - I share Wood's intense dislike for historical writing so filled with jargony gobbledygook that whatever narrative might be lurking within is utterly obscured by language which means absolutely nothing to anyone not in tune with the babble of befuddling banality unleashed on society by the theoreticians. I also happen to agree with Wood on another of his major points (that history "may not teach us particular lessons, but it does tell us how we might live in the world", that a historical sense "will give us the best guide we'll ever have for groping our way into an unpredictable future").

Wood is nothing if not very a careful historian, and many of the reviews included here offer cautionary notes for would-be writers of history. He argues against the practice of offering exaggerated claims of how x influenced y ("in most cases tracing the source of broadly shared ideas is a fool's errand" - 29); urges historians to be conscious of - and quite wary of - inserting anachronism and/or presentism into their writing; and suggests that historical writing should be seen as less a vehicle for imparting lessons than the opportunity to explain, to tell a story.

There weren't all that many things said in Wood's reviews that I found myself in strong disagreement with, one important exception being his 1991 NYRB review of Simon Schama's Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations). In this very non-traditional book, which the author himself described as something of an experiment, Schama inserted fictional musings and "novelistic devices" into his narrative: Wood was profoundly disturbed by this, and both in his review and in the afterword to it printed here decries the "devastating effects such a work by a distinguished historian could have on the conventions of the discipline" (109). Since I feel myself completely capable of distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction (and perhaps because I do like a bit of historical fiction if it's written well), I had no problem with Schama's experimentation in Dead Certainties, and wouldn't mind reading more of it (I do agree, however, with Wood's criticism about the book being classified as history by the Library of Congress and not fiction - that is problematic).

When my copy of The Purpose of the Past arrived, I immediately opened to the last review to see if it was the one I hoped it would be: Wood's 28 June 2007 NYRB review of two recent books (Lawrence Goldstone's Dark Bargain and Robin Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery). I had reviewed Goldstone's book almost a year earlier, and was pleased to see many of my own criticisms echoed by Wood (who offered what I think was a very fair and even-handed treatment of a truly misguided book). Goldstone's vituperative response to Wood's review is a prime example of how not to react to criticism: he suggests that Wood "dismisses" his work as that of an amateur, when (as Wood replied) Goldstone's lack of "academic appointment" has nothing whatever to do with the failings of Dark Bargain.

Writers and readers of American historical scholarship will find Wood's essays enlightening, clearly-written, and at time provocative. I recommend them highly.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2008/04/book-review-purpose-of-past.html ( )