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If the
above-
quoted passages haven't made it clear, reading
The Making of Americans is kind of like mental vacuuming: you keep going over the same thoughts and phrases, sometimes taking it in more of them and sometimes less, every once in a while coming across a new scrap of verbal debris which is immediately sucked up by a powerful nozzle and occasionally spit back in fragments. It's also best done while doing something else: listening to music, waiting for water to boil, even watching TV. The whole thing takes a fairly long time but is oddly calming, and at the end you feel a vague sense of accomplishment out of all proportion to the actual difference between where you started and where you've ended up.