I enjoyed the content of this book, but I was listening to the unabridged audio version, and the reader was just awful; she read the book like an annoying children's story, it made it hard to even get even get through the book.

When I got this book, I was dubious that it could be interesting. I could believe there was enough info on SUV's to fill a chapter or two, but not a whole book. This book was interesting from start to finish, a lot of fascinating detail on how our political system works, and history of the automobile industry, and it is very engagingly written.

My only warning would be that this book can make just about anyone angry: if you consider yourself an environmentalist, then learning the history of how Detroit and our policiticans are being very short sighted regarding saftey and pollution is infuriating. If, however, you feel that governement regulation has no place regulating industry or you don't believe in global warming, then Bradsher's writing will piss you off, because he very clearly comes down on the side of the environmentalists.

It was a good idea to review these episodes in American history, but the events are presented in a shallow, jingoist manner, and were not informative or insightful.

This is a great series. This year the selection seemed to have more of an anti-religious and political tone, but most of the selections are still well-written, educational and thoughtful.

There were a few hard to believe scences (the lynching) but overall, this was a suprising, interesting and wonderfully warm historical novel.

This is a truly wonderful anthology. Thought-provoking, humorous, almost every chapter taught me something new and fascinating.

I enjoyed this as a book on tape, but I've enjoyed Eugenides' othe work much more. The reader made a number of surprising mispronounications.

Some good essays here, but a number of boring ones as well, if they had 100 years of essays to choose from, I'm suprised this was the best they could come up with.

Say you take a gifted writer with no musical background, hand him a fiddle, and tell him to play "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." How do you think that would sound? Or the opposite: let's take a talented musician, enthusiastic but undereducated, and ask him to write a book. How would that book come out? A lot like this, obviously. The reason I gave this book 2 stars and not 1 star is that it was really quite interesting... interesting to ponder what sort of person would write a book like this, and what sort of person would enjoy it. My thoughts on this sort of writer: if he had been born in Afghanistan, he would be Taliban. But instead he was born here, so he spouts off about Jesus and Patriotism. Thank God this is still a free country and folks like this can't tell the rest of us how to live! Keep your fingers on that fiddle Charlie, but please don't write anything but your grocery list ever again.

I wanted to like this book. The premise is excellent, and it does have moments of brilliance. But it has more moments that drag on and are annoying. It is two stories in - the journey of a young man to trace the roots of his family who survived the holocaust, and a fantasy-fiction-within-a-fiction tale of an old Ukranian shetl. The shtetl section is captivating at times, but is mostly too clever by half. The other part of the story is much better. I listened to the audio version, and the "Ukranian" reader was terrible, he sounded like Steve Martin from Saturday night live pretending to be a Wild and Crazy guy. The whole book would have been much better if it were about 1/2 the number of pages.