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Updated February 2008

JIM'S PICKS

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Story of America
by Allen Weinstein & David Rubel

The Story of America presents the history of the United States not as a parade of facts and dates but as a story with twists and turns, heroes and villains, lovers, saints—and even some comic relief. With the help of more than two dozen eminent colleagues, many of them Pulitzer Prize—winners, Allen Weinstein and David Rubel give you American history from Columbus to the present not as you've studied it before, but as Americans lived it at the time. It’s a fascinating way to understand how America became a world power and the ways in which the nation’s past continue to impact its present. With hundreds of brilliant images, and prose as captivating as that of any good novel, The Story of America fills in the blanks in your education with tales and observations that delight as they inform.

If you liked this book might also enjoy:

American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips
Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper
The War That Made America by Fred Anderson

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1776
by David McCullough

Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. It is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the King's men, the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known.

Written as a companion work to his celebrated biography of John Adams, David McCullough's 1776 is another landmark in the literature of American history.

If you liked this book might also enjoy:

John Adams by David McCullough
His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis
Benjamin Franklin by Edwin S. Gaustad

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Blood and Thunder
by Hampton Sides

In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people’s chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting his whole long life. He had come to see if the rumors were true—if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished—but what did the arrival of these “New Men” portend for the Navajo?

Narbona could not have known that “The Army of the West,” in the midst of the longest march in American military history, was merely the vanguard of an inexorable tide fueled by a self-righteous ideology now known as “Manifest Destiny.” For twenty years the Navajo, elusive lords of a huge swath of mountainous desert and pasturelands, would ferociously resist the flood of soldiers and settlers who wished to change their ancient way of life or destroy them.

If you liked this book might also enjoy:

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier
Sea of Thunder by Evan Thomas
Ship of Ghosts by James D. Hornfischer

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The River of Doubt
by Candice Millard

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

If you liked this book might also enjoy:

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

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Bringing Down the Mob
by Thomas A. Reppetto

In his fascinating sequel to American Mafia, Reppetto follows the mob after its peak during Prohibition and the mayhem that followed. Drawing on a lifetime of field experience, he tells the stories of the Mafia’s twentieth-century bosses, showing how men such as Sam Giancana, “Crazy Joe” Gallo, and John Gotti became household names. By 1960 crusaders such as Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, Robert Kennedy, and scores of ordinary cops and U.S. marshals began to gain the upper hand in what became a war against organized crime.

If you liked this book might also enjoy:

Contract on America by David E. Scheim
Mafia Wife by Lynda Milito
Quitting the Mob by Michael Franzese

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Legacy of Ashes
by Tim Weiner

For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.” Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record.

Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.

If you liked this book might also enjoy:

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson
The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers A. Johnson

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Nobody's Son
by Luis Alberto Urrea

Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining. Urrea endured violence and fear in the barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son's ethnicity. He suffered disease and abuse, and he learned brutal lessons about machismo. But there were gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck, or witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love.

His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of Americans who have waged war—both in the political arena and in their own homes—to claim their own personal and cultural identities. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us.

If you liked this book might also enjoy:

My Invented Country by Isabel Allende
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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