BOOK REVIEWS [ 85 ] humanities at Johns Hopkins University, has a doctorate in classics from Yale, and is a man of extraordinary erudition. Inventing America (the title is drawn from Edmundo O'Gorman's 1961 play The Invention of America) is in many ways a remarkable book. It adds much to our knowledge of the eighteenth century's concepts of balance and measure, its love of mechanism and curiosity, and its idiosyncratic use of words. Jefferson was an eighteenth-century man as much as an American, and Wills thinks that this founding father invented America for us by finding it not mysterious and making it so. Although this is a worthy idea on the author's part, and even a noble one, Inventing America remains, nevertheless, a series of related essays, many of them brilliantly lucid. In the end, we are not moved to conclude that we should revalue historical overviews or made to pause for much reflection. edward j. foote, Stowe-Day Foundation