Booknotes: On American Character

The bestselling Booknotes series celebrates C-SPAN's 25th anniversary with a new collection examining our country and its character.

Over the past twenty-five years, C-SPAN has established itself as a national treasure. And Booknotes, the flagship of its book programming, has become the premier place to see serious, thoughtful nonfiction get its television due. Over the past fifteen years, Brian Lamb, the CEO of C-SPAN and host of Booknotes, has interviewed 765 authors on the program, and these deep and wide-ranging interviews have been the basis for three bestselling Booknotes books. Now, in a new collection, Booknotes: On American Character, Lamb has selected seventy original pieces that reveal something about America: the nation's people, history, and character.

Here are biographies of artists, businessmen, politicians, and inventors; stories of events famous, infamous, and less well-known in the nation's history; a look at how politics works in America and how the nation responds to conflict. Our leading historians, journalists, and public figures draw from a diverse set of sources to examine what kind of nation and people we are. The result is a valuable addition to the Booknotes legacy and a welcome read for any fan of the program.

"Readers who watch Lamb's engrossing TV interviews will welcome the book." George Cohen, Booklist

"[T]hese pieces — lacking the orienting and framing clues that the host's questions provide to the TV audience — tend to lurch from one topic to another....There are eminent personages aplenty in here, but they're not shown in their best light." Publishers Weekly

The host of Booknotes presents a third collection of interviews with non-fictions writers from the C-Span television program. Nearly 80 non-fiction American writers comment on the country's leaders, social movements and political visions, America at war, law and order, inventors and businessmen, and cultural heritage.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A compilation of excerpts from 150 of the best interviews with authors from Lamb's unique C-SPAN show, Booknotes is "a font of enjoyment. The anecdotes and observations collected here are deeply amusing, absorbing, and affecting" (Booklist).

Brian Lamb, the founding CEO of C-SPAN, has been the host of Booknotes since its inception in 1989. He has read each of the 765 books that Booknotes has featured. Lamb lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Introduction
Views from the Right 3
Views from the Left 8
Benjamin Franklin: Printer, Scientist, Founding Father 15
The Louisiana Purchase 22
Character and Characters in the U.S. Senate 28
Leadership in Wartime 34
Abraham Lincoln 41
The Disputed Election of 1876 49
James A. Garfield 58
The McKinley Assassination 67
Edith and Woodrow Wilson 77
Walter Judd: Doctor, Missionary, Congressman 83
Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower: A Presidential Partnership 92
Senator Richard Russell of Georgia 101
Two Presidential Memoirs 109
Carry A. Nation, Prohibitionist 117
The Triangle Fire 126
The Civil Rights Movement 135
His Civil Rights Years 143
Friedrich Hayek, Free Market Philosopher 151
Barry Goldwater and the Rise of Conservatism 157
The Coors Family 163
Libertarianism 169
Six Views of Race in American Society 174
American Multiculturalism 185
The Problem of Illegal Immigration 190
The Failure of the Welfare System 198
The American Revolution 207
The End of the Civil War 214
American Imperialism 220
Sinking the Lusitania 229
World War I in Flanders 237
The Paris Peace Conference 246
Nazi Germany's Kulturbund 254
World War II Espionage 263
World War II in North Africa 270
The Bataan March 277
The U-2 Spy Plane 284
The CIA's Covert Operatives 292
A Vietnam War Memoir 301
Vietnam POW Jim Thompson 307
Creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 315
Fighter Pilot John Boyd 320
America's Modern-Day Military 327
John Marshall and the Supreme Court 335
John Knox and the 1936 Supreme Court 343
Frank and Jesse James, Outlaw Brothers 352
A History of Violence in America 359
The Child Molestation Cases of the Early 1980s 367
The Modern Supreme Court 374
The Early Years of the First Female Justice 383
America's Black Market in Sex and Drugs 390
Robert Fulton and the Steamboat 397
Charles Goodyear and Rubber Vulcanization 406
Andrew Carnegie 413
Philo T. Farnsworth: The Inventor of Television 421
The Tuxedo Park Science Laboratory 429
A Road Trip with Albert Einstein's Brain 439
Martin Frankel's Financial Scams 446
Sandy Weill and the Rise of Citicorp 452
William Minor and the Oxford English Dictionary 461
Stephen Crane, Civil War Novelist 468
Sinclair Lewis, Novelist and Social Critic 474
William James, Popular Intellectual 481
Gutzon Borglum, Creator of Mount Rushmore 488
Norman Rockwell's Portraits of America 496
The Forged Poem of Emily Dickinson 503
A Life in Music 510
Tupac Shakur and Hip-Hop Culture 517
America's Mottoes and Pledges 524
Teaching U.S. History 527
Presidential Rhetoric 535
Appendix 543
Complete list of C-Span Booknotes (1989-2004) 545
Index 571