This is a discounted bundle featuring Quicklets on 5 bestselling American History books, including:
-Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
-Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns
-Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries
-Bill Bryson's Made in America
-Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower
Below are some selected excerpts. Buy them together and save over 60% off the combined price!
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From the Quicklet on Benjamin Franklin:
As this is, of course, a biography of a man’s life, it follows that Walter Isaacson has chosen to tell that life’s story chronologically. Fortunately for his reader, though, he opens the book with a few intriguing insights into Benjamin Franklin’s character:
“He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound political thinkers....the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continued to reinvent, was himself.”
And just then, when we want to know more—to know it all—Isaacson takes us back; takes us away to a land across the ocean. In so doing he lays down the framework upon which B. Franklin would live his life and offers us a much greater understanding of our subject.
Isaacson takes us to the 16th Century, the earliest point in time when a direct ancestor of Benjamin Franklin can be found (largely due to the fact that before such time, the surname “Franklin” did not even exist). The author explains, in a quick primer, the changing nature of the populace in Western Europe in this Renaissance-cum-Elizabethan era, as “commoners” and peasants began to emerge from the veil of feudalism in England, as the merchant class arose and as, slowly, merit began to surpass bloodline in dictating one’s future. This change would not come into fruition until the founding of the American state, and is arguably a line of thinking that strongly informs much of the American identity to this day.
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From the Quicklet on The Warmth of Other Suns:
Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns is truly a labor of love. It took 15 years to research and write, as she interviewed over 1,200 people. Wilkerson tracked down her subjects at churches, quilting clubs, funerals, family reunions, and others. After preliminary rounds of interviews, she narrowed her search down to 30 people, and then chose the three main subjects who appear in the book.
She was racing against the clock to collect as many stories as possible from the migrants, whose numbers were starting to dwindle. Her book even covers the funerals of both George Starling and Robert Pershing Foster.
In order to write her story in a heartfelt manner, Wilkerson recreated Robert Foster’s exhausting drive from Louisiana to California. Dr. Foster drove through three states without rest because blacks weren’t welcome at any motels in those regions. Wilkerson’s trip was cut short by her parents, who insisted she stop before reaching dangerous levels of fatigue. At a particularly perilous tract of the drive, Wilkerson writes that her mother said, “You know he must have been ready to cry right about here.”
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From the Quicklet on Revolutionaries:
Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America adds an interesting twist to the format of writing a nonfiction book on the nation’s founding period. Author Jack Rakove tells a personalized tale from the perspective of America’s founding fathers as private individuals turned public figures during the forefront of the revolutionary revolt against British colonial rule. The book focuses on the period from 1773 to 1792 and highlights many historical household names and lesser-known contributors to America’s invention.
