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A historical, biographical, and literary celebration.
By Garry Wills
One of our foremost political historians compares Jefferson's initial draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final document, uncovering a far different original intent than the final version shows and offering readers a fresh perspective on both the Declaration and Jefferson's political thinking.
By David McCullough
The award-winning historian restores to the fateful year its perilous immediacy and heroic human dimension. Detailing how military mishaps early in 1776 were salvaged by the great American victory at Trenton, McCullough draws an especially vivid portrait of George Washington and the revolutionaries who answered his call.
By Richard Ford
In this Pulitzer Prize-winner, Ford follows middle-aged realtor Frank Bascombe through the course of a fateful July 4th weekend as he struggles with work, ex-wife, girlfriend, and children. Its deceptively casual literary art makes this one of the most engaging, valuable, and telling novels of the past two decades.
By Joseph J. Ellis
In his insightful portrait of the most intellectually complicated of the Founders, Ellis reveals the character of Thomas Jefferson while explaining the intellectual currents that influenced his thought, detailing his debt to political thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Winner of a 1997 National Book Award.
By Pauline Maier
Maier's brilliant intellectual history of America's founding document traces the roots and branches of the Declaration from its drafting through its sanctification in the nineteenth century and its enduring significance. Along the way, it illuminates many of the ideas and events that have shaped our national identity.
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
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