This fun, fast-paced tour of American portraiture from the colonial era to the present manages to be both scholarly and quick-witted. Saunders zigzags through our national history in a series of thematically organized chapters to show how Americans have portrayed themselves in art, photography, and other media. Facebook may be a recent phenomenon, but American Faces demonstrates that the compulsive need to present a likeable image of the self to friends and strangers goes back to the founding of the country.
