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Jon Meacham

Biography

Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power, AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House, FRANKLIN AND WINSTON, DESTINY AND POWER: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and THE SOUL OF AMERICA: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.

Jon Meacham

Books by Jon Meacham

by Jon Meacham - Biography, History, Nonfiction

Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents --- a remote icon --- or as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction. This illuminating new portrait gives us a very human Lincoln --- an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community; who insisted that slavery was a moral evil; and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave him to see the right.

by Jon Meacham - Biography, History, Nonfiction, Politics

John Lewis, who at age 25 marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful.

by Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw - History, Music, Nonfiction

Through all the years of strife and triumph, America has been shaped not just by our elected leaders and our formal politics but also by our music --- by the lyrics, performers and instrumentals that have helped to carry us through the dark days and to celebrate the bright ones. From “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “Born in the U.S.A.,” Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw take readers on a moving and insightful journey through eras in American history and the songs and performers that inspired us. Meacham chronicles our history, exploring the stories behind the songs, and McGraw reflects on them as an artist and performer. Their perspectives combine to create a unique view of the role music has played in uniting and shaping a nation.

by Jon Meacham - History, Nonfiction, Politics

Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in THE SOUL OF AMERICA, Jon Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history.

by Jon Meacham - Biography, Nonfiction, Politics

Drawing on President Bush’s personal diaries, the diaries of his wife, Barbara, and extraordinary access to the 41st president and his family, Jon Meacham paints an intimate and surprising portrait of an intensely private man who led the nation through tumultuous times. From the Oval Office to Camp David, from his study in the private quarters of the White House to Air Force One, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the first Gulf War to the end of Communism, DESTINY AND POWER charts the thoughts, decisions and emotions of a modern president who may have been the last of his kind.

written by Jon Meacham, read by Edward Herrmann - Audiobook, Biography, History, Nonfiction

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.

by Jon Meacham - Biography, History, Nonfiction, Politics

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of AMERICAN LION and FRANKLIN AND WINSTON brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. THE ART OF POWER gives us Thomas 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.