Adult

Graced by David McCullough’s remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in 19th-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.

In the years around 1870, when the project was first undertaken, the concept of building a great bridge to span the East River between the great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the pyramids. Throughout the 14 years of its construction, the odds against the successful completion of the bridge seemed staggering. But this is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle: it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time and of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or obstructing the great enterprise.

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of AMERICAN LION and FRANKLIN AND WINSTON brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE ART OF POWER gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era. Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

THE GREATER JOURNEY is the enthralling, inspiring --- and, until now, untold --- story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work. Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough writes, “Not all pioneers went west.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. With the help of the “muckraking” press, Roosevelt had wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses and corrupting money brokers. Roosevelt led a revolution that he bequeathed to Taft only to see it compromised as Taft surrendered to money men and big business.

Using meteorologist Isaac Cline's own telegrams, letters and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful and unbearably suspenseful, ISAAC'S STORM is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, Walter Isaacson's book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk --- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate --- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits and free individuals.