Synopses & Reviews
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning social historian Richard Kluger,
Seizing Destiny is a sweeping chronicle of how the vast territory of the United States was assembled to accommodate the aspirations of its people regardless of who objected. It is a remarkable story of how Americans extended their sovereignty from the Atlantic coastline to the mid-Pacific in the first 125 years of their national existence.
America's surge to dominion was equally admirable and appalling. The nation's pioneer generations were, to be sure, blessed with remarkable energy, fortitude, and boundless faith in their own prowess. They were also grasping opportunists, ravenous in their hunger to possess the earth, who justified their often brutal aggression by demeaning the humanity of nonwhites.
These visionary nation-builders proclaimed earnestly, if not innocently, their own rectitude to be the force behind the heroic "taming" of the wilderness and saw in this triumph the hand of Providence. Their good fortune was thus transformed into a mission of continental entitlement their "manifest destiny," as they began calling it well after the process was under way. Yet declaring it did not make it so. As we see, luck and their foes' weaknesses played no less a role.
In a compelling drama, vivid with historical detail, we watch three of the most brilliant Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams outfox British, French, and Spanish diplomats to win more than ample boundaries for their new republic. Finesse, however, had little to do with General Andrew Jackson's Indian-slaughtering and disdain for the Spanish garrison in capturing Florida. Or with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams's bluff and bluster in gaining for the nation a northwest passage to the Pacific. Or with how the single-minded James Polk, devious and manipulative, confected a war with Mexico and thereby amassed more land than any other U.S. President.
We learn why the nation's most famous acquisition, France's Louisiana Territory, had little to do with Thomas Jefferson's foresight and everything to do with Napoleon's failure to subdue black freedom fighters in the jungles of Haiti. Sam Houston tried vainly to prevent the predictably suicidal defense of the Alamo before he could rally rowdy Texans to win their independence. William Seward, in just one week, overcame political disrepute and convinced a hostile Senate to approve his secret deal with Russia to buy seemingly useless Alaska. And Teddy Roosevelt connived with the Panamanians to win land for the canal that so enhanced America's economic dominance.
Comprehensive and balanced, Seizing Destiny is a stunning reinterpretation of American history, revealing great accomplishments along with the American tendency to confuse success with heaven-sent entitlement.
Review
"In Seizing Destiny Richard Kluger has given us a vivid narrative of just how British colonials and then citizens of a new nation swept aside everything in their path as they spread their dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This is not a celebratory story, but it is brilliant history." Dan Carter, author of Scottsboro
Review
"This is history on a grand scale, the story of a colonial wilderness as it grew in size and power to be the geographic and political United States of today. Kluger has created an overarching narrative without scanting the drama of individual episodes. Seizing Destiny is not a whitewash: greed, cunning, bloodshed, and chicanery play a large part in enforcing the sometimes fatally tempting notion of manifest destiny. This is an important book and a timely one as well, especially given our present misery about where 'destiny,' guided by our national 'decider,' is taking us." Justin Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
Review
"Epic themes have returned in full force to the writing of American history, as is evident in this sweeping narrative of how Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, encountered a continent commensurate to their capacity for wonder and suppressing all doubts and reservations made of it one nation, with oceanic territories, protectorates, and an affiliated commonwealth thrown in for good measure." Kevin Starr, author, California, A History
Review
"The United States became a continent-spanning country through cunning, diplomacy, aggression, dumb luck, and derring-do–not to mention occasional chicanery. Writing with uncommon brio and without illusions, Richard Kluger brilliantly tells the epic tale of how these United States came to be." David M. Kennedy, author, Freedom from Fear and Pulitzer Prize winner
Review
"This is a magisterial account of a monumental subject, nothing less than the acquisition and occupation of America. In Kluger's capable hands it is a story of courage and cunning, destiny and depravity, bravado and brutality, the defining themes of American history, dripping with irony." Joseph J. Ellis, author, Founding Brothers
Review
"Kluger's writing is some of the worst I have ever had to read....If I had not agreed to review this book, I would have stopped after five pages. After 600, I felt as if I were inside a bass drum banged on by a clown." Richard Brookhiser, New York Times
Review
"[Kluger] is master of a kind of sweeping but detailed historical synthesis that is held together through the force of a lively but unobtrusive prose style." Newsday
Review
"Richard Kluger does full justice to the epic he subtitles How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea." Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review
"Each of Kluger's chapters is a precise synthesis of how an important chunk of land was added to the United States....The problem is it doesn't all add up." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Kluger means well, but in trying to write a history of an entire continent over five centuries, he is in over his head. Lacking competence in the historical sources, he makes a hash of their evidence. Struggling to master the complexities of a distant past and a grand scale, he reaches backward for the reassuring simplifications of an earlier generation. With the best of intentions, he hopes to teach Americans to regret how we won this continent, and to reflect on the current implications of past misdeeds; but he undermines his case by indulging in retrograde and distorting national and racial stereotypes. Recycling those caricatures inevitably vindicates Americans as the deserving winners of a nasty competition with inevitable losers." Alan Taylor, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
About the Author
Richard Kluger's books include Simple Justice, the classic account of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision ending racial segregation of the nation's public schools, and The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, both finalists for the National Book Award. His critical history of the tobacco industry, Ashes to Ashes, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1997. He is also the author or coauthor of eight novels. He lives with his wife, Phyllis, in Berkeley, California.