Welcome to my monthly book recommendation for May! Every month, I recommend a book that I’ve personally read and find worthwhile enough to recommend to my own readers. In each post, I’ll introduce the book, discuss why I found reading it worthwhile, and the major themes the book touches upon. I won’t include any major spoilers, but I may discuss some of the characters and specific details or locations from within the book.
My recommendation for May 2025 is H. W. Brands’ American Dreams: The United States Since 1945.
American Dreams: The United States Since 1945
Available on Amazon
Authors: H. W. Brands
Genre: Non-fiction
Description: The story of our nation from the A-bomb to the iPhone from bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands
With keen insight and an impeccable sense of the spirit of the times, H. W. Brands, one of today’s preeminent historians, captures the American experience through the last six decades. As he chronicles politics, pop culture, and everything in between, Brands traces the changes we have gone through as a nation, recounting the great themes and events that have driven America- from the Yalta conference to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Apollo 11 to 9/11, My Lai to “shock and awe.”
In his adroit hands, movements and trends unfold through a character-driven narrative that shines a brilliant light on America’s watershed moments and reveals a still unfolding legacy of dreams.
My Thoughts
American Dreams offers a simple canvassing of the United States’ history from the late 1940s to the early 2010s, organized by chapters that generally span roughly two decades. Unlike history books you may have used during public school, this book weaves presidents, events, and cultures together seamlessly. There are no interruptions for commentaries, reviews, or exercise questions. It reads almost as if it were a novel with no dialogue, only a narrator, one not motivated by political party affiliation. The author offers no judgement on the events that took place or the motivations of those involved, save three judgments of particular policies of which both sides of the political spectrum would agree.
I originally decided to read this book for my own curiosity of my country’s recent history. In the past, I’ve educated myself on many of the particulars covered in this book, but I never spent time studying our history on a holistic level. This book provides that holistic overview, enabling me to turn the page from event to event in a way I haven’t done before. Halfway through the book, I decided to recommend it in my monthly book recommendation series for two reasons: it will be an easy read for most people, and in this moment in our country’s history, it’s more important than ever before that we educate ourselves on our past – our failures, our successes, and our cultural progressions and regressions. While I would certainly recommend this book for the first reason alone, the second makes it all the more imperative.
