The American Future: A History
By Simon Schama
The Bodley Head £20, 400 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

I wasn’t on the flatboard before the truck roared off; I lurched, a rider grabbed me, and I sat down. Somebody passed a bottle of rotgut, the bottom of it. I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical air of Nebraska. ‘Whooee, here we go!’ yelled a kid in a baseball cap, and they gunned up the truck to 70 and passed everybody on the road. ‘We been riding this sonofabitch since Des Moines. These guys never stop.’”