Answer:
Explanation:American Character,” the sequel, is somewhat less satisfying. Woodard, an award-winning journalist for the Portland Press Herald in Maine, is a terrific writer, and his range is impressive. His musings about the impact of Ayn Rand on American conservatism or a day spent in the terrifying blackness of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crumbling Romanian dictatorship are elegant set pieces. The problem is with the larger thesis of the book. It’s one thing to take on a huge subject such as “the epic struggle between individual liberty and the common good” in our history. It’s quite another to try to squeeze it into the multi-regional model that defined his earlier work. Despite some truly original insights, the result, too often, is a disjointed narrative, lurching from era to era, crisis to crisis, with the leading actors scrutinized by their places of origin — Yankeedom, Tidewater, Far West — as if personal geography was the determining factor in most everything they did.