Prolific author Robert Kagan’s latest elevation of Americans to God’s new chosen people leaps from the 688 pages of his new book, The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941. It is probable that none wish it were longer, as sage Samuel Johnson said of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The lion’s share of Kagan’s handiwork is a workmanlike chronicling of United States politics and foreign policy from the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba, in 1898 through Pearl Harbor in 1941. The chronicle is meticulous but no literary equivalent of the Hope Diamond.