Booknotes: Stories from American History - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142002496 ISBN 13: 9780142002490

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2002

Synopsis

American history is shaped by great and small events, and in recent years a generation of writers has brought these events to life. They have shared these stories with the viewers of the long-running C-SPAN author-interview program Booknotes, and here some of the best have been collected for readers to savor. In this volume, more than eighty contemporary writers and historians examine seminal moments from American history, celebrated and uncelebrated alike.

Booknotes offers readers conversational essays edited from the interview show, providing an enticing selection of author-subject pairings. For anyone interested in America's rich history-and especially the devoted fans of C-SPAN's Booknotes-this is an engaging compendium of information, opinions, and new perspectives.

About this title

About the Author:

Brian Lamb, the founding CEO of C-SPAN, has been the host of Booknotes since its inception in 1989 and has read each of the more than six hundred books that the program has featured.

From School Library Journal:

Adult/High School-This book covers different facets of U.S. history from the Boston Tea Party to Dan Rostenkowski's fall from power, with the greatest emphasis on 20th-century events. Historians and participants discuss the most important aspects and the telling details of the events that they have analyzed. Based on the interviews on the C-SPAN program Booknotes, these essays are not the scholarly pieces that make history seem dry and dusty. (Students will find no footnotes here.) Andrew Young describes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s decision to go to jail in Birmingham, AL, in support of the people who were already imprisoned because "there was nothing else to do." Jack Rakove describes the Virginia Plan that was used as the basis for the Constitution as something the Virginians and Pennsylvanians cooked up while they were "sitting around Philadelphia waiting for the other delegations to appear." Each entry is no more than 8 to 10 pages in length. The colorful details will make these events, both great and small, come to life for today's readers.
Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0142002496
• ISBN 13: 9780142002490
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 556