Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The author's premise is that American History textbooks try to present our past as heroic and mythic; omitting the bad and mischaracterizing the evil done in our past. To show this, the author states that he has surveyed 12 textbooks and interprets their contents. I would not recommend this book for various reasons. The author's style makes for a rather tedious read. His constant repetition and rephrasing of material accounts for much of the book's contents. The book is actually a pamphlet that has been bloated through the use of needlessly restating already presented material. Another problem is that the author holds that the omission of any material at all from the textbooks is a deliberate act of biased editorialising. So, for instance, if President Woodrow Wilson is not painted as racist as he should be in Textbook "A", it is not as a result of space or time limitations of High School curriculum, but rather "agenda." Something else that bothered be was that fact that Loewen couldn't let his quotations speak for themselves. For instance, when quoting a passage from one of the Puritans speaking of God, "...we thank Him [sic]..." Loewen inserts the [sic] to demonstrate that he is not capitalizing the Divine Pronoun, but thus it was found in the unenlightened original. Also, when one of the European invaders of the Americas refers to the natives as "...Savages [sic]..." Loewen has to insert the [sic] to show that the ignorant Europeans didn't realize the correct posit, as Loewen does, that one should speak of the Native Americans as civilized and the European invaders as savages.