This short book began life as a magazine article, the lead article in the March 7, 1936 Saturday Evening Post. Upon demand, Lane expanded her description and published it in book form in 1936. She added more data from the World War and depression before publishing it again in 1954. Enough of the publication history, what is it?

The book is a travelogue of the mind, body, and spirit of Rose Wilder Lane. She starts as a communist, progresses through Jeffersonian Democrat, and finally arrives at being an individualist libertarian. She does this by describing the reality of what she sees as she physically travels through Western and Eastern Europe, into Lenin’s Russia, then back through the American Midwest of the New Deal. What she learns is in part the nature of American Exceptionalism, and in part the reality behind the ‘progressive’ politics of her age. She reports the nature of her findings in her usual clear and straight-forward style.

Some of her observations match those of others, but frequently with a unique twist. For example: Americans are the most generous people in the world; and it is because they all fear that they may someday need help themselves. The free market is indeed chaotic, but most of the progress of civilization in the 19th and 20th centuries is a direct result of that chaos. She even gives some explanation of why others envy and resent that exceptionalism.

I can only wish that I had read the booklet 50 years ago, and recommend that you don’t waste as much time as I did. ( )