This wide-ranging, interesting, well-written book addresses a topic of perennial importance to Americans and to those in other countries who follow what goes on in the United States (i.e., a good chunk of the world). The book is full of intriguing observations and wonderful quotations from an array of cultural sources, but it offers no profound new ideas, no hypothesis-testing or forms of causal analysis, and no scholarly framework—which perhaps is not surprising for an author who is the founder of a firm “offering cultural insight to Fortune 500 organizations” (from the jacket). I certainly enjoyed reading The American Dream but I cannot claim to have learned a great deal from it. I will, however, mine it for quotations when I teach or write about U.S. political ideology.
The author, Lawrence Samuel, begins with the accurate observation that James Truslow Adams was the first to use the phrase “American Dream”...