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Russell Shorto

Biography

Russell Shorto

Russell Shorto is the bestselling author of THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, AMSTERDAM, REVOLUTION SONG and SMALLTIME, and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland.

Russell Shorto

Books by Russell Shorto

by Russell Shorto - Memoir, Nonfiction

SMALLTIME is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, Russell Shorto’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life --- and wife --- in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. The book draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But SMALLTIME is something more. The author enlists his ailing father --- Tony, the mobster’s son --- as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch.

by Russell Shorto - History, Nonfiction

Russell Shorto takes us back to the founding of the American nation, drawing on diaries, letters and autobiographies to flesh out six lives that cast the era in a fresh new light. They include an African man who freed himself and his family from slavery, a rebellious young woman who abandoned her abusive husband to chart her own course, and a certain Mr. Washington, who was admired for his social graces but harshly criticized for his often-disastrous military strategy. Through these lives, we understand that the revolution was fought over the meaning of individual freedom, a philosophical idea that became a force for violent change.

by Russell Shorto - History, Nonfiction

Tourists know Amsterdam as a picturesque city of low-slung brick houses; student travelers know it for hash bars; art lovers know it for Rembrandt's glorious portraits. Amsterdam is the font of liberalism, in both its senses. Tolerance for free thinking and free love make it a place where, in the words of one of its mayors, "craziness is a value." Russell Shorto reveals how the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam has had a profound effect on Dutch --- and world --- history.