THE AMERICANS: THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIENCE by DANIEL J.BOORSTIN 717 pages. Random House. $10.
Historian Daniel Boorstin is a man with an encyclopedic mind and a crusty disregard for the conventional chronicling of what he calls, with disdain, "important events." His idiosyncratic approach to history needs no better demonstration than this third volume of a trilogy that has included The Americans: The Colonial Experience and The Americans: The National Experience.
It rounds out Boorstin's version of the American experience by taking the measure of the U.S. during the last hundred years, but it is the...