Pulitzer Prize Winners for General Nonfiction
at the SJRCC Libraries

PAL = Palatka Campus | OPC = Orange Park Campus | SAC = St. Augustine Campus

2008: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer - Publisher's Marketing: "The result of more than 30 years of research and investigation, this important new volume presents a thorough historical study of the events beyond the usual analysis of German policies, decisions, and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of modern genocides."

Call number: SAC - D804.3 .F753 2007

2007: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright - Publisher's Marketing: "A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright’ s remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.
"The Looming Tower" achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI’ s counterterrorism chief, John O’ Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.
As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS" Cole" . . . O’ Neill’ s heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki’ s transformation from bin Laden’ s ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
"The Looming Tower" broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despairing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; familylife in the al-Qaeda compounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O’ Neill’ s high-wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life— he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others’ existence— and the nitty-gritty of turf battles among U.S. intelligence agencies.
Brilliantly conceived and written, "The Looming Tower" draws all elements of the story into a galvanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at September 11, 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing terrorist threat."

Call number: SAC - HV6432.7 .W75 2006

Call number: PAL - HV6432.7 .W75 2006

2006: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins - Publisher's Marketing: "As part of the Allied forces, thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya’ s largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu— some one and a half million people.

The compelling story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths was the victim of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising. Caroline Elkins spent a decade in London, Nairobi, and the Kenyan countryside interviewing hundreds of survivors of the camps and the British and African loyalists who detained them.

The result is an unforgettable account of the unraveling of the British colonial empire in Kenya— a pivotal moment in twentieth- century history with chilling parallels to America’ s own imperial project."

Call number: SAC - DT433.577 .E45 2005

Call number: PAL - DT433.577 .E45 2005

Ghost Wars answers the questions so many have asked since the horrors of September 11: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail?"

Call number: SAC - DS371.2 .C63 2005

Call number: SAC - HV 8964.S65 A67 2004

2003: "A Problem from Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power - Publisher's Marketing: "In her award-winning interrogation of the last century of American history, Samantha Power -- a former Balkan war correspondent and founding executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy -- asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policy makers, access to newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power provides the answer in "A Problem from Hell" -- a groundbreaking work that tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act."

Call number: SAC - HV6322.7.P69

Call number: PAL - HV6322.7 .P69 2000

2002: Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter - Publisher's Marketing: ""The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, journalist and daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI documents, interviews with black activists and former Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the city, the personalities, and the events that brought about America's second emancipation."

Call number: SAC - F334.B69 N449 2002

Supported by a vast array of previously untapped primary documents, "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan "is perhaps most illuminating in lifting the veil on the mythology surrounding the emperor's impact on the world stage. Focusing closely on Hirohito's interactions with his advisers and successive Japanese governments, Bix sheds new light on the causes of the China War in 1937 and the start of the Asia-Pacific War in 1941. And while conventional wisdom has had it that the nation's increasing foreign aggression was driven and maintained not by the emperor but by an elite group of Japanese militarists, the reality, as witnessed here, is quite different. Bix documents in detail the strong, decisive role Hirohitoplayed in wartime operations, from the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 through the attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately the fateful decision in 1945 to accede to an unconditional surrender. In fact, the emperor stubbornly prolonged the war effort and then used the horrifying bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with the Soviet entrance into the war, as his exit strategy from a no-win situation. From the moment of capitulation, we see how American and Japanese leaders moved to justify the retention of Hirohito as emperor by whitewashing his wartime role and reshaping the historical consciousness of the Japanese people. The key to this strategy was Hirohito's alliance with General MacArthur, who helped him maintain his stature and shed his militaristic image, while MacArthur used the emperor as a figurehead to assist him in converting Japan into a peaceful nation. Their partnership ensured that the emperor's image would loom large over the postwar years and later decades, as Japan began to make its way in the modern age and struggled -- as it still does -- to come to terms with its past.

Until the very end of a career that embodied the conflicting aims of Japan's development as a nation, Hirohito remained preoccupied with politics and with his place in history. "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" provides the definitive account of his rich life and legacy. Meticulously researched and utterly engaging, this book is proof that the history of twentieth-century Japan cannot be understood apart from the life of its most remarkable and enduring leader."

Call number: SAC - DS889.8 .B59 2000

Call number: OPC - DS889.8 .B59 2000

2000: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower - Publisher's Marketing: "A foremost historian examines Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II, giving readers the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted. 75 illustrations."

Call number: SAC - DS889 .D69 1999

1999: Annals of the Former World by John McPhee - Publisher's Marketing: "The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title "Annals of the Former World.
Like the terrain it covers, "Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction."

Call number: SAC - QE77 .M38 2000

1998: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond - Publisher's Marketing: "Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be. It is a work rich in dramatic revelations that will fascinate readers even as it challenges conventional wisdom."

Call number: SAC - HM206 .D48 1997

1997: Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger - Publisher's Marketing: "No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes -- mankind's most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product -- with such sweep and enlivening detail.
Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process -- financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal -- are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever more stridently as Americans debate whether smoking should be closely regulated as a major health menace.
We see tobacco spread rapidly from its aboriginal sources in the New World 500 years ago, as it becomes increasingly viewed by some as sinful and some as alluring, and by government as a windfall source of tax revenue. With the arrival of the cigarette in the late-nineteenth century, smoking changes from a luxury and occasional pastime to an everyday -- to some, indispensable -- habit, aided markedly by the exuberance of the tobacco huskers.
This free-enterprise success saga grows shadowed, from the middle of this century, as science begins to understand the cigarette's toxicity. Ironically the more detailed and persuasive the findings by medical investigators, the more cigarette makers prosper by seeming to modify their product with filters and reduced dosages of tar and nicotine.
We see the tobacco manufacturers come under intensifying assault as a rogue industry for knowingly and callously plying their hazardous wares while insisting that the health charges against them (a) remain unproven, and(b) are universally understood, so smokers indulge at their own risk.
Among the eye-opening disclosures here: outrageous pseudo-scientific claims made for cigarettes throughout the '30s and '40s, and the story of how the tobacco industry and the National Cancer Institute spent millions to develop a "safer" cigarette that was never brought to market.
Dealing with an emotional subject that has generated more heat than light, this book is a dispassionate tour de force that examines the nature of the companies' culpability, the complicity of society as a whole, and the shaky moral ground claimed by smokers who are now demanding recompense."

Call number: SAC - HV5760 .K58 1997

1995: The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time by Jonathan Weiner - Publisher's Marketing: "On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch.
In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself. The Beak of the Finch is an elegantly written and compelling masterpiece of theory and explication in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould."

Call number: SAC - QL696 .P246 W45 1994

1994: Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire by David Remnick - Publisher's Marketing: "In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. "A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all."--Wall Street Journal."

Call number: SAC - DK288 .R46 1994

1993: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills - Publisher's Marketing: "The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom"--by tracing its first birth to the Declaration of Independence (which called all men equal) rather than to the Constitution (which tolerated slavery). In the space of a mere 272 words, Lincoln brought to bear the rhetoric of the Greek Revival, the categories of Transcendentalism, and the imagery of the "rural cemetery" movement. His entire life and previous training, his deep political experience, went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. As Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel has been restored to its bold colors and forgotten details, Garry Wills restores the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln at Gettysburg combines the same extraordinary quality of observation that defines Wills's previous best-selling portraits of modern presidents, such as Reagan's America and Nixon Agonistes, with the iconoclastic scholarship of his studies of our founding documents, such as Inventing America. By examining both the Address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew and reveals much about a President so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world, to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns. The Civil War is, to most Americans, what Lincoln wanted it to mean. Now Garry Wills explains how Lincoln wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken."

Call number: PAL - Civil War Collection E475.55 .W54 1992

1992: The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin - Publisher's Marketing: ""The Prize" recounts the panoramic history of oil - and the struggle for wealth and power that has always surrounded oil. This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations. "The Prize" is as much a history of the twentieth century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of history is enormous - from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqui invastion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm."

Call number: SAC - HD95606 .Y47 1990

1991: The Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson - Publisher's Marketing: "This landmark work, the distillation of a lifetime of research by the world's leading myrmecologists, is a thoroughgoing survey of one of the largest and most diverse groups of animals on the planet. Holldobler and Wilson review in exhaustive detail virtually all topics in the anatomy, physiology, social organization, ecology, and natural history of the ants. In large format, with almost a thousand line drawings, photographs, and painting, it is one of the most visually rich and all-encompassing view of any group of organisms on earth. It will be welcomed both as an introduction to the subject and as an encyclopedia reference for researchers in entomology, ecology, and sociobiology."

Call number: PAL - 595.796 H737 1990

1989: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan - Publisher's Marketing: "Neil Sheehan's monumental bestselling account of the Vietnam War, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Award. This tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment, and disillusionment in Vietnam. 16-page photo insert."

Call number: SAC - DS558 .S47 1989

1988: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Publisher's Marketing: "Rhodes tells, for the first time, in rich human, political and scientific detail, the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. 128 photos."

Call number: SAC - QC773 .R46 1988

1986: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas - Publisher's Marketing: "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Book Award, this book examines school integration in Boston from the vantage points of three families: one black and two white."

Call number: SAC - F 73.9 .A1 L85 1985

1985: The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel - Publisher's Marketing: "The first trade paperback edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book with a new Preface by the author. "As in "Hard Times" and "Working", this master interviewer again creates a turbulent epic of human experience by quoting the words of those who lived it. . . . A vivid resurrection of a lost time".--"Newsday"."

Call number: SAC - D811.A2 T45 1984

1984: The Social Transformation Of American Medicine by Paul Starr - Publisher's Marketing: "Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries."The definitive social history of the medical profession in America....A monumental achievement."--H. Jack Geiger, M.D., "New York Times Book Review""

Call number: SAC - RA395.A3 S77 1982

1979: On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson

Call number: SAC - GN365.9 .W54 1978

Call number: PAL - GN365.9 .W54 1978

1978: The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence by Carl Sagan - Publisher's Marketing: "Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
"A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday...It's a delight."
THE NEW YORK TIMES"

Call number: PAL - BF431 .S2 1977

1977: Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay by William W. Warner - Publisher's Marketing: "William Warner exhibits his skill as a naturalist and as a writer in this Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the pugnacious Atlantic blue crab and of its Chesapeake Bay territory."

Call number: PAL - SH380.45.U5 W37 1977

1976: Why Survive?: Being Old in America by Robert N. Butler - Publisher's Marketing: "Looks at prevailing attitudes toward aging as well as the economic and medical needs of elderly citizens."

Call number: SAC - HQ1064.U6 B87 2002

1975: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard - Publisher's Marketing: "An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons-a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays -King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers."

Call number: OPC - QH81 .D56 1985

1974: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker - Publisher's Marketing: "Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work, "The Denial of Death" is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing."

Call number: PAL - BD444 .B36 1973

1973: Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances Fitzgerald - Publisher's Marketing: "This landmark work, based on Frances FitzGerald's own research and travels, takes us inside Vietnam -- into the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages and the corrupt crowded cities, into the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks -- and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. With a clarity and authority unrivaled by any book before it or since, "Fire in the Lake" shows how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.
-- In the 30 years since its initial publication, "Fire in the Lake" has achieved the status of a classic.
-- An essential text for students of Asian-American relations."

Call number: SAC - DS556.9 .F57 2002

Call number: PAL - DS557.A6 F53 1972

1972: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 by Barbara W. Tuchman - Publisher's Marketing: "Barbara W. Tuchman uses the life of Joseph Stilwell, the military attache to China in 1935-39 and commander of United States forces and allied chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek in 1942-44, to explore the history of China from the revolution of 1911 to the turmoil of World War II, when China's Nationalist government faced attack from Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents. Her story is an account of both American relations with China and the experiences of one of our men on the ground. In the cantankerous but level-headed "Vinegar Joe", Tuchman found a subject who allowed her to perform, in the words of The National Review, "one of the historian's most envied magic acts: conjoining a fine biography of a man with a fascinating epic story"."

Call number: SAC - E745.S68 T8

Call number: OPC - E745.S68 T8 1970

Call number: PAL - E745.S68 T8 1970

1971 - The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 by John Toland - Publisher's Marketing: "This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, "The Rising Sun is, in the author's words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened--muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."
In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from "The Rising Sun, it is "that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.""

Call number: PAL - D767.2 .T58 1970

1969: So Human an Animal by Rene Jules Dubos - Publisher's Marketing: "Is the human species becoming dehumanized by the condition of his environment? So Human an Animal is an attempt to address this broad concern, and explain why so little is being done to address this issue. The book sounds both an urgent warning, and offers important policy insights into how this trend towards dehumanization can be halted and finally reversed. Dubos asserts that we are as much the product of our total environment as of our genetic endowment. In fact, the environment we live in can greatly enhance, or severely limit, the development of human potential. Yet we are deplorably ignorant of the effects of our surroundings on human life. We create conditions which can only thwart human nature. So Human an Animal is a book with hope no less than alarm. Science can change our suicidal course by learning to deal analytically with the living experience of human beings, by supplementing the knowledge of things and of the body machine with a science of human life. Only then can we give larger scope to human freedom by providing a rational basis for option and action."

Call number: PAL - HM206 .D87 1968

1968: Rousseau And Revolution, The Tenth And Concluding Volume Of The Story Of Civilization by Will And Ariel Durant - Publisher's Marketing: "Rousseau and Revolution, Volume 10 of Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization, ranges over a Europe in ferment, but centers on the passionate rebel--philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great exponent of the romantic impulse toward self-exploration and social revolt, who contended with the great rationalist, Voltaire, for the mind of Europe. Rousseau condemned civilization as a disease, glorified the noble savage, proclaimed to the world with equal intensity his own love affairs and the natural Rights of Man, and became the patron Saint of the Revolution and the worldwide social upheavals of two centuries."

Call number: SAC, OPC and PAL - CB53 .D85

1965 - O Strange New World: American Culture, the Formative Years by Howard Mumford Jones

Call number: PAL - E169.1 .J644 1964

1964: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter - Publisher's Marketing: "A book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society."

Call number: OPC - E169.1 .H74 1970

Call number: PAL - E169.1 .H74 1963

1963: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman - Publisher's Marketing: ""More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten."

Call number: OPC - D530 .T8 1962

Call number: PAL - D530 .T8 1962

These words, written by Theodore H. White in the opening chapter of this classic book, are as true today as when they were written nearly a half-century ago. White's unprecedented examination of crucial campaign, in which the young and charismatic John F. Kennedy squared off against the seasoned vice president, Richard M. Nixon, is both a fascinating historical document and a compelling narrative of character and consequence. The distinguished reporter's detailed appreciation of the instinct and experience that shape the political process is a revelation in our current age of sound bites, relentlessly chattering punditry, and the all-consuming influence of television—an influence first felt in the Kennedy-Nixon debates that proved to be a critical factor in the 1960 election.

Following seven candidates from the earliest stirrings of aspiration through the rigors of the primaries, the drama of the conventions, and the grueling campaigning that culminated in one of the closest electoral contests in our nation's history, White provides a valuable education in the ways and means of our political life. The Making of the President 1960 is an extraordinary document, a celebration of the genius of American democracy and an anatomy of the ambition, cunning, and courage it demands from those who seek its highest office. For what it can teach us about the forces that determine the destiny of presidential candidates, it remains required reading today."

Call number: PAL - E840 .W5 1961