By convention, I title all book review posts with the title and author of the book. I confess, in this case I was really tempted to title the post “Bathroom reading for pseudo-intellectuals”.

Fair disclosure: I received this book as a review copy.

Burke is, of course, the author of Connections, which created quite a buzz as both a book and a PBS series decades ago. The current book uses the same conceit, of providing a tour of some aspect of history by tracing connections from one thing to another. In Connections there was some point to this; here it really is merely a conceit.

Burke has taken for his subject the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and written a short…um, well. I was going to say “a short essay”, but perhaps “a few pages” will do. He has written a few pages for each, tracing a connection from the signer through a chain of more-or-less well-known people to someone reasonably “present day”. For example, he traces a chain from John Hancock the signer to a radio deejay named John Hancock who won an award in 1996.

Thus, each piece is something of a tour of political and intellectual history from 1776 to the present day. I suspect most who read it will learn a little bit of history, and that many will think they’ve really learned something important. But the connections from person to person are often extremely tenuous, and the details about each are little more than brief anecdotes. Burke clearly did a great deal of research, but I suspect he was more interested in the peculiar and sensational than he was in the truth. Certainly he doesn’t give anything like a balanced view of anyone he writes about.

Like Chasing the Rising Sun I used this as a book-of-opportunity for a month or so, reading a section or three while having a snack or waiting for Jane; it was mildly entertaining, for awhile. I got about halfway through it, and then moved on to other things.