The series in which this book appears intends to cover as many aspects of life since the 1980s as possible in each volume, and to do so in an accessible manner. In this regard, M. J. Heale, a retired British history professor and author of several works on twentieth-century American political history, has achieved both of those goals. A readable study of US politics from the Reagan years to 2010 (and with substantial material on the 1970s), the book is so successful in integrating every bit of information on the era that it amounts to one of the most reliable guides that I have ever encountered on the subject. That is its great strength but also its weakness.

In Contemporary America, Heale has meticulously combed the literature to produce a remarkably detailed study of the past three decades. Through fourteen tightly presented chapters, he walks us through each decade, sometimes each year, and certainly each presidency. He is interested in uncovering influential patterns, shifts, and movements, but with a particular focus on individual leaders. As a result, one comes away from his book with the impression that Reagan and Clinton understood the country, global trends, and the presidency, while the Bushes and Obama were place-holders less capable of meeting the challenges of their eras. In this regard, I was slightly disappointed with an organization that relies on a traditional approach defined by presidential terms; thus many themes – immigration, the environment, trade, and others – transcend the artificial schedules of four-year White House tenures as they persist regardless of the office-holder.

That said, this encyclopedic compilation offers an argument that mostly holds up. Heale posits that American neglect of the world before the 1980s gave way thereafter to a keen interaction via an explicit engagement with economic competition, immigration, and environmental issues. In this regard, he builds a good case but the argument is also slightly tenuous because it is hard to argue that the United States was not already embedded in the world before 1980. For instance, America had long been transformed by migrants from other lands who had arrived in numbers (droves, really) that rival today's figures. So was the country not also changed by wars that occurred before the Reagan years? Furthermore, a look at the Reagan chapter yields less evidence for America in the world. Heale would have been better served in arguing that internationalization emerged as a factor from 1980 onward. Considering the myriad of facts and figures about domestic politics in each chapter, one would hardly come to the conclusion that America was not a free agent able to make history without a care for the outside world.

The author also somewhat subverts the argument, in any case, by his very thoroughness. He was apparently on a quest to cram every bit of history into this book, which makes it read like a textbook and veers the reader away from his international theme. How do, say, the Perot and Buchanan insurgencies in the 1992 election, or Mondale's earnestness in 1984, relate to globalization?

Still, if read as a primer for the past three decades, this book has great merits – the main one being how Heale marshaled some fascinating statistics. For instance, that Americans had increased their credit card indebtedness tenfold from 1969 to 1980 (to $22 billion), and, just fourteen years later, that that amount had nearly quadrupled to $74 billion, is staggering to contemplate, especially when considering the impact on our economy and relationship with the world. Almost every figure rolled out on globalizing business reveals how large in scope that process is. And the political revelations are always surprising, even if unbelievable! Thus, such tidbits as a whopping 49 percent of people polled just four years after he left office believed that Reagan's economic policies had failed (130), or that some 183 members of Congress opposed the motion authorizing military force in the Gulf War in 1991, the largest opposition since the War of 1812 (142), or that Nancy Reagan's “Just Say No” campaign helped lower marijuana use among high-school seniors (110) give the lie to pundits and political hacks from either liberal or conservative persuasions prone to perpetuate myths on either side.

I could cite dozens of other useful statistics, but suffice to say that although Heale's book tries to do too much, and thus occasionally veers off-message, it is certainly a worthwhile addition to the historians’ library. More than that, it provides a solid grounding for students regarding their understanding of the contemporary world.