Companionable ... Gage says she wanted her book to steer clear of both 'veneration' and 'damnation' — the unmodulated opining that characterizes a lot of our historical dialogue and casts the country as either a hero or a villain. What comes through in her book is how complicated and just plain weird a lot of American history is ... The places that Gage visits are often marked by contradiction, which she highlights to powerful effect ... As a guide, she is necessarily inviting; as a historian, she knows that none of the attempts to fulfill the Declaration’s promise of freedom and equality has ever come easily.
Gage...is an accomplished historian and a capable writer. This Land Is Your Land touches impressionistically on a huge cast of characters ... Especially engaging is her tour of western New York’s Burned-Over District, named for its repeated firestorms of religious innovation and political radicalism in the early 19th century ... Still, the book doesn’t quite deliver on its promise; this 'warts-and-all' look at the American past dwells, a bit predictably, on the warts.
