America: A Rediscovery

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

If you subscribe to Time magazine and enjoy Lance Morrow’s essays, then this book is for you.

To be sure, you may also want the book for its 170 full-colour photographs sumptuously reproduced by Key Porter’s Italian printing firm. But be warned — the pictures do not necessarily match the text, and they all come from a picture book. Result (as they say in Time): a grab-bag of trite photos. The Statue of Liberty is on the dustjacket, and inside are shots of the White House, Mount Rushmore, and a bald eagle. This fact gives unintended meaning to the subtitle of the book.

YOU’LL ALSO FIND THE LARGE TYPESCRIPT ANNOYING UNLESS YOU NORMALLY READ WITH A MAGNIFYING GLASS. COME TO THINK OF IT, A MAGNIFYING GLASS WOULDN’T BE A BAD IDEA FOR A FEW OF THE DETAILED 2 ½ x 2 ½ SHOTS THAT APPEAR IN THE BOOK.

Which gets us back to Lance Morrow’s essays variously entitled “American Patchwork,” “Ideas and Shadows,” “Symbols,” “The Texan Myth,” “We the People,” and “A Sense of Place.”

The essays have some good lines. For example: “Geographical space in America fulfills the role that time serves in other cultures. Other cultures, rooted in the same place, have spread out over time. America, rooted in a short time, a short history, spread out over space” (p. 11). That’s “time” without the capital T. There are also a number of delectable stories that I wouldn’t be surprised to see pop up later in the “Personal Glimpses” columns of the Reader’s Digest. My own favourite concerns a touch football game played by Morrow and the Kennedys with “Whizzer White,” a future Supreme Court Justice (pp. 19-20).

That said, I must confess that I do not share the enthusiasm that many feel for Morrow’s writing. I find it self-centred, self-indulgent, and self-important. At one point, Morrow refers to a complaint made by a Texan, of all people, that he used “big words” in his Time column. Well, who cares? Certainly not Morrow, who dots this text with words like “filigreed.”

This book should really have been titled Lance Morrow’s America. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Morrow was commissioned by the publisher to write six essays, and he did what he was paid to do.

But somehow I can’t warm up to a product like this. I don’t buy at Shopper’s Drug Mart simply because Bea Arthur is its spokesperson, and I wouldn’t buy this book simply because I heard that Lance Morrow writes for Time magazine.