Just another book recommendation most will have no time for and a couple--three Pynchon associations. If interested.

[Mark Kohut]

*THESE TRUTHS; A History of the United States, *Ms Jill Lepore's new book
is awe-inspiring. As lyrically written as,
who?, Fitzgerald, F. Scott and as erudite as who?, you pick. Samuel Eliot
Morison, Toynbee, even Pynchon, he says
obliquely and will risk more hyperbolic stretching: it is a history of the
Unites States one might *imagine* an historian
who was Pynchon-like might write:

What do I mean? The worst and the best; the brave new ideas (and ideals)
and their lack therefore. The horrors, Mistah Kurtz. One thing she does is
tell
both factual stuff and ideas' stuff simultaneously, as it were. Striations
of history within History, if that is not too precious an attempted
aphorism.
Example: "Hobbes, working out a theory of the origins of civil society
by *deducing
*[my heightening], pondered the violence in Virginia:
The horrors of the Jamestown Colony, including murder and cannibalism...he
would later write, in *The Leviathan, *a treatise in which he
concluded that the state of nature is a state of war, "of every man against
every man"....Of course, the advertisement for the trip promised
a bounty-like Eden.

But here are two actual Pynchon-like echoic associations. First, as in our
favorite book about a corrupted, lost, text from history, did you know, I
didn't,
that Columbus' diary was lost but had been copied down by a friar, whose
copy was also lost --until about 1790. So, did the friar 'copy' or create?:
 historians want to know--and that faded handwriting?
On historical records: "Nature takes one toll, malice another", she writes.

And, echoing our favorite historical novel, Attorney General Edward Coke
(called 'ungovernable' more than once) appears early. He resurrected the
Magna Carta--see it almost run
out of history, another lost 'map'--and therefore the rule of law for the
world...leading the Founding Father Englishmen in the new world to know
they must have a written constitution
and the Magna Charter---would anyone buy a red hat with MAGNA on
it?--played a pivotal role in the 'history of truth: it demanded trials
which demanded evidence which meant verifiable facts and proper reasoning
about them.  No more trial by water or fire or combat.

She's got the right stuff and has more salient footnotes than God.
Follow-up reading could be a career.  And I'm not yet to page 50.