Contemporary Literary Criticism | Ambrose, Stephen - Blaine Harden (review date 11 February 1996)

Blaine Harden (review date 11 February 1996)

SOURCE: “Where the Wild Things Were,” in Washington Post Book World, February 11, 1996, pp. 3, 7.

[In the following review, Harden offers positive assessment of Undaunted Courage.]

Feeling unmoved? Sensing perhaps that you live in uninteresting times? Weary of politicians who define vision as kicking AIDS victims out of the military? If so, historian Stephen Ambrose has a tonic for you.

Undaunted Courage is about a time when America was young, the federal government was bold and the president knew what he was doing. President Thomas Jefferson executed the Louisiana Purchase for a song, doubled the territory of the country overnight and in 1803 dispatched a handsome 30-year-old Virginian to do nothing less than fill in the blanks of our collective future.

Meriwether Lewis, a tobacco grower with an indifferent education, could not remember how to spell his widowed...

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