Brave Companions: Portraits In History

Brave Companions: Portraits In History (1992) David McCullough

This collection of essays move forward in American history, as David McCullough writes about everyone from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Emily Roebling to the city of Washington D.C.

Perhaps oddly, it is the last essay (the one that reads like a graduation speech) that I liked the best. For in it, he writes first of the tremendous changes that have occurred since 1936:

Real progress has been made, in much of everyday life. Anyone who doubts this need only imagine–or recall–a visit to a 1930’s dentist.

This is one of the things I try to remember when technology and the modern world become frustrating: It is so much better to be living in the future.

But more important he writes of the importance of history:

Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along–and furthermore, doesn’t care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we appear to have an unending supply of patriots who know nothing of the history of this country, nor are they interested.

That. That right there is why I read about history.
Rating: 8/10

Published by Simon & Schuster

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