A splendid history of a very complicated period, this book was well worth the effort and the many stops and starts I had while working through it. Howe is at his best when writing on social change, religion, and the texture of Whig ideals, all of which suits me just fine. He's especially good at bringing out the virtues of people like John Quincy Adams, eventual badass, and Nicholas Trist, whom I'd never heard of but might be my new hero; and the vices of Jackson, Tyler, and Polk.

As some happy few readers of my tags here will infer, I read this as part of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Effete Liberal Book Club, which we his commentariat have pursued in the wake of his Civil War obsession. (Side note: You've got to love a man whose Civil War-related reading includes, most recently, his first trip through Jane Austen, because he wants to understand the roots of 19th-c. ladyhood. That's right: He reads Austen to understand war. That's a man's man if ever I met one. And yet he totally gets her. Calls her Jane Awesome. Okay, end encomium.) Anyway, as a lens on the roots of the Civil War, this book is excellent, as it is on pretty much everything else it touches. Watching as the second party system collapses, as economics give way to sectional issues, makes a strange mirror to the US politics of my lifetime.

One might wish in addition for a little more narrative sweep or moral clarity. Perhaps that standard is unfair when the last thing like this I read was Battle Cry of Freedom, but there you are. This book probably won't change your life, but it will inform and delight. Truly excellent stuff.