Paul Johnson has died at 94

"Paul Johnson, prolific journalist and best-selling popular historian, has died at 94. The range of his writing’s subject matter was astonishing: from Egyptology and the history of the Jews and Christianity to that of the United States; from studies of Mozart, Napoleon, and Darwin to art history and the history of modern times. He was, as this range might suggest, vastly knowledgeable and possessed of an elephantine memory. He was also a formidable polemicist: indeed, it was as if he were born with polemic in his blood."

I have his A History of the American People, c1997. Amazing writer. Originally a Leftist and Socialist, he moved to the Right when he realized what it actually was. Unfortunately, Johnson wrote very loooong books--about 1,000 pages with 2,000 notes. So I haven't finished the book.

Knowledge and Verve: Remembering Paul Johnson (city-journal.org)

"There’s an old joke that academics bitterly complain about popular historians for the high sin of publishing books people enjoy reading. Few working journalists have written history with as much elan and narrative force as the British author Paul Johnson, who died this week at age 94." Wall St. Journal

America has political and economic Alzheimer's Disease?

 

Paul Johnson is a very fine historian—love his “A History of the American People,” and he’s British. I missed what he published in April in Forbes about Trump and political correctness. 

“Nowhere has PC been more triumphant than in the U.S. This is remarkable, because America has traditionally been the home of vigorous, outspoken, raw and raucous speech. From the early 17th century, when the clerical discipline the Pilgrim Fathers sought to impose broke down and those who had things to say struck out westward or southward for the freedom to say them, America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything–until recently. Now the U.S. has been inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone.

For these reasons it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous. He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.

No one could be a bigger contrast to the spineless, pusillanimous and underdeserving Barack Obama, who has never done a thing for himself and is entirely the creation of reverse discrimination. The fact that he was elected President–not once, but twice–shows how deep-set the rot is and how far along the road to national impotence the country has traveled.

Under Obama the U.S.–by far the richest and most productive nation on earth–has been outsmarted, outmaneuvered and made to appear a second-class power by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. America has presented itself as a victim of political and economic Alzheimer’s disease, a case of national debility and geopolitical collapse.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/currentevents/2016/03/23/when-excess-is-a-virtue/#7a02557734b5