Books: History of the U. S. Dream

THE EPIC OF AMERICA—James Truslow Adams—Little, Brown ($3). Not Prohibition but the U. S. itself, thinks James Truslow Adams, is the noble experiment. He calls it the "American dream." In this one-volume history of the U. S. he shows the beginnings of the dream, its sinkings into nightmare, its lapses into crude daylight reality, its volatile rises. Professional historian, no mealy-mouthed panegyrist, Adams has written his epic in curt, clear narrative; but "the epic loses all its glory without the dream. The statistics of size, population, and wealth would mean nothing...