Posts Tagged ‘The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield’

Books Make Great Gifts: For The History Buff

December 13th, 2011

Attractive, smart, thoughtful, unique, and easy to wrap—books are definitely the perfect gifts. In honor of the holiday season, we’ve put together a series of thematic gift guides that will help you pick a great book for everyone on your list.

Our favorite part about history? Just when you think you’ve heard it all, there’s another story left to tell. We know that the History Buff is a curious reader, so we’ve got something to satisfy each one.

Don’t forget to check out our lists for The Literary Lover and The Mystery Maven. Still to come, books for The Nonfiction Aficionado, The Humorist, and The Nonconformist. For more suggestions in the meantime, check out Random House’s holiday gift guides.

The Warmth of Other SunsThe Warmth of Other Suns
By Isabel Wilkerson
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
Read an Excerpt | Watch An Interview With Isabel Wilkerson | Buy the Book

At HomeAt Home
By Bill Bryson
With his signature wit, charm, and seemingly limitless knowledge, Bill Bryson takes us on a room-by-room tour through his own house, using each room as a jumping off point into the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted. As he takes us through the history of our modern comforts, Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world eventually ends up in our home, in the paint, the pipes, the pillows, and every item of furniture. Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and his sheer prose fluency makes At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

Hellhound On His Trail
Hellhound On His Trail
By Hampton Sides
On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel. The nation was shocked, enraged, and saddened. As chaos erupted across the country and mourners gathered at King’s funeral, investigators launched a sixty-five day search for King’s assassin that would lead them across two continents. With a blistering, cross-cutting narrative that draws on a wealth of dramatic unpublished documents, Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers, delivers a non-fiction thriller in the tradition of William Manchester’s The Death of a President and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. With Hellhound On His Trail, Sides shines a light on the largest manhunt in American history and brings it to life for all to see.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

First FamilyFirst Family
By Joseph J. Ellis
In this rich and engrossing account, John and Abigail Adams come to life against the backdrop of the Republic’s tenuous early years. Drawing on over 1,200 letters exchanged between the couple, Ellis tells a story both personal and panoramic. We learn about the many years Abigail and John spent apart as John’s political career sent him first to Philadelphia, then to Paris and Amsterdam; their relationship with their children; and Abigail’s role as John’s closest and most valued advisor. Exquisitely researched and beautifully written, First Family is both a revealing portrait of a marriage and a unique study of America’s early years.
Read an Excerpt | An Exclusive Essay by Joseph J. Ellis | Buy the Book

On the State of EgyptOn the State of Egypt
By Alaa Al Aswany
From one of Egypt’s most acclaimed novelists, here is a vivid chronicle of Egyptian society, with penetrating analysis of all the most urgent issues—economic stagnation, police brutality, poverty, the harassment of women and of the Christian minority, to name a few—that led to the stunning overthrow of the Mubarak government. Al-Aswany addresses himself to all the questions being asked within Egypt and beyond: who will be the next president, and how will he be chosen in a land where heretofore only simpletons, opportunists and stooges involved themselves with elections? What role will the Muslim Brotherhood play? How can democratic reforms be effected among a people used to such contradictions as the religiously observant policeman who commits torture? In a candid and controversial assessment of both the potential and limitations that will determine his country’s future, Al-Aswany reveals why the revolt that surprised the world was destined to happen.
Table of Contents | Buy the Book

The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield
The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield
By H.W. Brands
Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand Central Hotel in 1872, financier James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk, Jr., was a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the geographically crucial Erie Railroad, Fisk was a flamboyant exemplar of a new financial era marked by volatile fortunes and unprecedented greed and corruption. But it was his scandalously open affair with a showgirl named Josie Mansfield that ultimately led to his demise. In this riveting short history—the first in his American Portraits series—H. W. Brands traces Fisk’s extraordinary downfall, bringing to life New York’s Gilded Age and some of its legendary players, including Boss William Tweed, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the railroad tycoon Jay Gould.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

The Killing of Crazy Horse
The Killing of Crazy Horse
By Thomas Powers
With the Great Sioux War as background and context, and drawing on many new materials, Thomas Powers establishes what really happened in the dramatic final months and days of Crazy Horse’s life. He was the greatest Indian warrior of the nineteenth century, whose victory over General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 was the worst defeat ever inflicted on the frontier army. But after surrendering to federal troops, Crazy Horse was killed in custody for reasons which have been fiercely debated for more than a century. The Killing of Crazy Horse pieces together the story behind this official killing.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

Winston's WarWinston’s War
By Max Hastings
Winston’s War is a vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime. Here are the glories and triumphs, the contradictions and blunders of the man who, through sheer force of will, kept Britain fighting in 1940. But as the tide of the war turned, historian Max Hastings shows how Churchill was often disappointed by the failure of the British Army to match his hopes on the battlefield, and by the difficulties of sustaining the wartime alliance not only with the Soviet Union, but also with the United States. With surprises on almost every page, Winston’s War is a riveting profile of one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

American ColossusAmerican Colossus
By H.W. Brands
In this grand-scale narrative history, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands brilliantly portrays the emergence, in a remarkably short time, of a recognizably modern America. American Colossus captures the decades between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century, when a few breathtakingly wealthy businessmen transformed the United States from an agrarian economy to a world power. From the first Pennsylvania oil gushers to the rise of Chicago skyscrapers, this spellbinding narrative shows how men like Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller ushered in a new era of unbridled capitalism. In the end America achieved unimaginable wealth, but not without cost to its traditional democratic values.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

The Civil War of 1812The Civil War of 1812
By Alan Taylor
In this vivid narrative, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor tells the riveting story of a war that redefined North America. In the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution. In this second confrontation, soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians fought to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British contain, divide, and ruin the shaky republic? Moving beyond national histories to examine the lives of common men and women, The Civil War of 1812 reveals an often brutal (sometimes comic) war and illuminates the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.
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More books for The History Buff: For the Soul of France, by Frederick Brown; And the Show Went On, by Alan Riding; The Missing of the Somme, by Geoff Dyer; Wicked River, by Lee Sandlin; The Man Who Ate His Boots, by Anthony Brandt.