From Sea to Shining Sea, by Gavin Young (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

Subtitled "A present day journey into America's past".

Subtitled "A present day journey into America's past".

It is a colourful, impressionistic tour of history and literature, including a visit to the waterfront taverns where Jack London once drank, tours of some of the Civil War's great battlefields, a reconstruction of the Battle of the Big Horn in which Custer and his cavalry (including his younger brother Tom) were killed and after wards mutilated, a sketch of the Steinbeck country, an evocation of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Perhaps all this is better enjoyed in individual episodes than as a coherent narrative.