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Paul Johnson is a British journalist who also is an amateur historian. In this book he sets out to write a comprehensive history of the US; however, his book is marred by serious shortcomings. The most obvious failing of this book is its abundance of factual errors. Previous reviewers have noted whoppers like Johnson's conflation of Civil War Gens. Joseph and Albert Sidney Johnston. Such errors abound throughout. Opening at random to the description of the Constitutional Convention, I quickly found Johnson erroneously describing Alexander Hamilton as "leading the federalists" during the convention; in fact Hamilton was absent from much of the convention and had little influence on its outcome. In the same account Gouvernor Morris of Pennsylvania is misidentified as a delegate from New York. It is true that in a book of such length and scope, even a professional historian could make errors, but the number of Johnson's mistakes and the ease with which many of them could have been avoided suggests that he did much of his writing and research sloppily. While the factual errors are the most apparent flaw in AHotAP, other shortcomings are more serious. Johnson repeatedly displays poor judgement in choosing which events to emphasize. He discusses minor issues and events at great length while giving short shrift to much more important topics. For example, writing about the Civil War, Johnson gives much attention to the actions of Col. John Mosby, an irregular cavalry leader who had little effect on the course of the war, while giving much less space to Grant's campaigns in the West from Fort Henry to Vicksburg, which were extremely important, and in some historians' view decisive. Turning to the post WW2 era, Johnson repeatedly trivializes major social movements, while magnifying trivial issues. The environmental movement gets a mere two paragraphs, and these merely to lament that it "added to [America's] problems of competing in the world." The environmental degradation which gave rise to the movement is barely noted. But Johnson has time to run on for pages about the "political correctness" issue, a teapot tempest manufactured by right-wing pundits. The civil rights movement fares a bit better--the entire period from the Montgomery bus boycott to Martin Luther King's murder gets a whopping two pages. Even so, the focus is almost entirely on King; Malcolm X, for example, an important and complex figure, is summarily, and inaccurately, dismissed as a "black racist." People like Fannie Lou Hamer are non-persons in Johnson's account. But he has space for a rhapsody of several pages on the "power" of Ronald Reagan's humor (humor that was in most cases, like the "there you go again" quip made much of by Johnson, scripted by the Gipper's aides). A third weakness is the incompleteness of Johnson's research. On many subjects, his notes reveal a failure to consult major, standard works on the topic. For example, no serious treatment of the rise of giant corporations can ignore the books of Alfred Chandler. No one could fairly criticize the foreign policy of FDR, as Johnson does, without at least consulting the standard works on that topic by Dallek and Divine. And any treatment of the Cold War worthy of serious attention must at least take into account the arguments of revisionist historians like Williams, Kolko, Gardner and Alperovitz. Yet Johnson appears never to have read any of their work. Of all AHotAP's faults, the most glaring are Johnson's dubious interpretations and judgements. Events are frequently viewed through an ideological filter, leading Johnson to conclusions that are almost impossible to justify rationally. The Great Depression, for example, would have ended, according to Johnson, by the end of 1930, had the government not interfered with the "self-adjusting" abilities of the economy (self-adjusting abilities which even conservative economists like Milton Friedman now admit do not exist). Prior to the civil rights movement, Johnson tells us, "blacks had failed to participate fully in American political life," as if blacks were not voting by choice, not because a mix of law and terror prevented them. Johnson's most warped judgements, which border on hysteria, concern President Nixon and his crimes--crimes which in Johnson's view were, as he says of the "plumbers" illegal acts, "activities of an entirely justified nature." Watergate is portrayed as an effort by evil liberal "witchhunters" to drive a good man from office; Nixon's central impeachable offense, that of obstruction of justice, goes entirely unmentioned. Also absent is the famous "smoking gun tape," which proved that Nixon was complicit in the Wagergate coverup from the start, and by providing such proof, caused most Senate Republicans to turn against Nixon, and caused Nixon to resign in the face of certain conviction and removal from office. Johnson simply pretends that this sequence of events never happened, and misrepresents Nixon as resigning "in the national interest" even though, as Johnson distorts it, he would not have been convicted. This book's shrill, tendentious nature make it entirely unsuited as an introduction to US history, and to anyone with knowledge of the subject, as I have, it is often genuinely painful to read. Doubtless many conservatives will find it congenial reading, since it tells them things they want to hear (the previous reviewer who acknowledged how glad he was to see a book that trashed FDR was tacitly admitting this). But a historian's job is not to comfort his readers in their prejudices, but to respect the truth and present the truth as best he can. Paul Johnson fails completely at this task.