Perspectives on America

(Baron, David) David Baron is an award-winning journalist and author of The Beast in the Garden, a former science correspondent for NPR, and former science editor for the public radio program The World. American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World (Liverlight) animates the fierce jockeying that came to dominate late nineteenth-century American astronomy, bringing to life the challenges faced by three of the most determined eclipse chasers who participated in this adventure. With memorable accounts of train robberies and Indian skirmishes, Baron’s page-turning drama refracts nineteenth-century science through the mythologized age of the Wild West, revealing a history no less fierce and fantastical.

(Shorto, Russell) Russell Shorto is the best-selling author of The Island at the Center of the World, and several other books, including Descartes Bones, Saints and Madmen, and Gospel Truth. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times magazine. Russell Shorto’s work has been praised as “first-rate intellectual history” (Wall Street Journal), “literary alchemy” (Chicago Tribune) and simply “astonishing” (New York Times). In his epic new book, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (W.W. Norton and Company), 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. A powerful narrative and a brilliant defense of American values, Revolution Song makes the compelling case that the American Revolution is still being fought today and that its ideals are worth defending.