James Patterson’s Grand Expectations is intriguing not as a work of history so much as a piece of history. It is the 1945-1974 volume of Oxford’s History of the United States (829 pages, $ 35), and it reveals (like shale to a paleontologist) a tremendous lot about the world in which it was made. At first, I mistook Patterson (who is a professor at Brown) for a leftist ideologue, but it soon became clear that he is in fact a scrupulous academic searching for a scholarly viewpoint above the fray. Read Patterson and you will hear about “the biases of historians (most of whom are liberals) . . .” He writes with integrity, strives for honesty. You will learn that Nixon’s Checkers speech was “maudlin and tasteless, and many contemporaries said so. But it was also a brave performance.” The text sways constantly in this manner from side to side. It is so evenhanded you could get seasick.

That is why Grand Expectations matters: The consistent biases of this author who is trying so hard to be unbiased are terribly revealing, and give his book the poignancy of a beating moth stuck in flypaper.