n unabashedly patriotic look at 40 Americans who exemplify the nation’s principal virtues.
Like many others, Ruesterholz believes the United States occupies a privileged place in the history of nations, a beacon of liberty and innovation for others. “America has inspired more freedom in more places than ever before; that is a reason to be proud,” he writes. “By encouraging hard work and rewarding success, America is home to unprecedented wealth. Today, Americans are worth over $130 trillion, an unrivaled sum. We have a history of innovation and invention from airplanes to rocket ships and smart phones to search engines.” To show the greatness of the United States, he profiles 40 admirable citizens from diverse realms. In this collection, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn join activists like Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and captains of commerce like Steve Jobs and Andrew Carnegie turn up along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Ruesterholz’s choices are not always the obvious ones: Along with more famous names, he discusses the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists on 9/11, who rose up against their attackers, showing how the “darkest of evils brought out the moral courage of seemingly ordinary citizens.” Each of the eight sections in his book focuses on a defining trait of the country: “resilience, daring, faith, fairness, sacrifice, drive, industriousness, and innovativeness.” The profiles are brief—typically only a couple of pages apiece—which tends to result in less-than-searching accounts that stick to well-known information.
