Wells, Herbert George. [Future in America: a search after realities.] **$2. Harper.
America’s social, economic, and material phases furnish conditions for objective scrutiny which any American would do well to observe. Mr. Wells finds the note of a “fatal, gigantic, economic development, of large prevision and enormous pressures” uppermost and invincible. His range of observations is broad, covering the main representative cities of America, his insight ready to cope with the peculiarly American conditions, and his comments virile and convincing.
“‘When the sleeper wakes,’ for example, is an astonishing caricature of the inordinate individualism of the American sort. ‘The future in America,’ a sober study of the same subject, is, we think, below it in insight as well as in effectiveness. Mr. Wells’s book is written rather in a mood of despondency.”
– Acad. 71: 544. D. 1, ’06. 1360w.
“His lucid and discriminating description of the present in America is probably worth more than his intended prophecy of the future of America would have been, had he ventured to write it.”
+ – Ath. 1906, 2: 614. N. 17. 370w.
“His is a book which will be criticised, but it will be read, and no reader will fail to gain from it a broader view of the great world-power with its vast opportunities and inequalities, its contradictions and aspirations, its towering wealth, and its suffering, which Mr. Wells has analyzed in this book.” James Wellman.
+ – Harper’s Weekly. 50: 1898. D. 29, ’06. 1810w.
“He has brought to the study of the social, economical, and material problems now confronting us an insight rarely found in an Englishman, and has given lucid expressions to certain ideas concerning the future which have been vaguely stirring in the national consciousness.”