What is America? A Short History of the New World Order

2008

From the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of A Short History of Progress comes another surprising, frightening and essential book.

The United States is now the world’s lone superpower, whose deeds could make or break this century. For better and worse, America has Americanized the world. How, in a mere two centuries, did a marginal frontier society become the de facto ruler of the world? Why do America’s great achievements in democracy, prosperity, and civil rights often seem threatened by forces within itself?

Brimming with insight into history and human behaviour, and written in Wright’s captivating style, What Is America? shows how this came to pass; how the United States, which regards itself as the most modern country on earth, is also deeply archaic, a stronghold not only of religious fundamentalism but of “modern” beliefs in limitless progress and a universal mission that have fallen under suspicion elsewhere in the west, a rethinking driven by two World Wars and the reckless looting of our planet.

What Is America? peels away historical myths to show how the United States’ legacy of conquest and empire-building -from the old Indian wars to the wars of today -has shaped the modern world.

A Short History of Progress

2004

Each time history repeats itself, so it’s said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water—the very elements of life.

The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress –based on his acclaimed 2004 Massey Lectures — Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have unleashed but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment’s inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Honours

Libris Nonfiction Book of the Year Award, 2005
Book of the Year: Independent
Book of the Year: Globe and Mail
British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction finalist