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The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians Audiobook
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Co-founder of The Carlyle Group and patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein takes readers on a sweeping journey across the grand arc of the American story through revealing conversations with our greatest historians.
In these lively dialogues, the biggest names in American history explore the subjects they’ve come to so intimately know and understand.
— David McCullough on John Adams
— Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson
— Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton
— Walter Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin
— Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln
— A. Scott Berg on Charles Lindbergh
— Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King
— Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson
— Bob Woodward on Richard Nixon
—And many others, including a special conversation with Chief Justice John Roberts
Through his popular program The David Rubenstein Show, David Rubenstein has established himself as one of our most thoughtful interviewers. Now, in The American Story, David captures the brilliance of our most esteemed historians, as well as the souls of their subjects. The book features introductions by Rubenstein as well a foreword by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to lead our national library. Richly illustrated with archival images from the Library of Congress, the book is destined to become a classic for serious readers of American history.
Through these captivating exchanges, these bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning authors offer fresh insight on pivotal moments from the Founding Era to the late 20th century.
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“With his legendary passion for American history, David Rubenstein’s conversations with scholars and authors bring our country’s story to life in a new way. The American Story illuminates the humanity, motivations, and lesser-known stories behind some of our country’s most notable leaders with lessons that are important for all of us today.”
— Bill Gates
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“David Rubenstein draws out compelling stories and unexpected insights in dialogues with some of the most important historians in America. For the reader who loves American history and biography, or for anyone who would like to start, this book is for you.”
— Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author -
“Rubenstein knows in his gut that we can’t know where we’re going without knowing where we’ve been. In The American Story, one of the best interviewers I know interrogates our greatest historians to find out about critical moments in our past that speak directly to our present moment.”
— Ken Burns, award-winning filmmaker
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About the Authors
David M. Rubenstein is the New York Times bestselling author, host of The David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg TV and PBS, an original signer of The Giving Pledge, and a recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the MoMA’s David Rockefeller Award. He is chairman of the boards of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is cofounder and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful private equity firms.
About the Narrators
David McCullough (1933-2022), acclaimed historian and #1 New York Times bestselling author, twice won the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams, and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback. His other acclaimed books are 1776, Brave Companions, The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Greater Journey, and The Wright Brothers. He was awarded numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and more than forty honorary degrees. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred on him its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Ron Chernow’s first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award and the Ambassador Award for his contribution to the study of American culture. Washington: A Life won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and Alexander Hamilton was the inspiration for the Broadway musical. The Warburgs won the Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing in 1993 and was also selected by the American Library Association as one of that year’s best nonfiction books.
Jean Edward Smith is an acclaimed biographer and university professor. Named “Today’s foremost biographer of formidable figures in American history” by George Will, he has written biographies on a number of prominent figures in US history. His work has earned him many awards and accolades; his biography of Ulysses S. Grant was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, and his biography on President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Eisenhower in War and Peace, was a New York Times bestseller. Currently, Smith is the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University; he also taught previously at the University of Toronto as a professor of political economy for 35 years.
H. W. Brands has written more than a dozen biographies and histories, including the The General vs. the President, a New York Times bestseller. Two of his biographies, The First American and Traitor to His Class, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Walter Isaacson is the author of highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including several biographies that have made the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. A professor of history at Tulane University, he has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.
Bob Woodward is an associate editor at the Washington Post where he has worked for forty-nine years and reported on every American president from Nixon to Trump. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for the Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, and second twenty years later as the lead Post reporter for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a #1 New York Times bestselling and award–winning author of acclaimed works of nonfiction. Her work for President Johnson launched her career as a presidential historian. Her first book was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She followed up with the Pulitzer Prize–winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II. She earned the Lincoln Prize for Team of Rivals, in part the basis for Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. She won the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, about the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Leadership: In Turbulent Times was the inspiration for the History Channel docuseries on Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, for which she was executive producer.
Taylor Branch is an acclaimed author and public speaker best known for his landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years. The trilogy’s first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards in 1989. Two successive volumes also gained critical and popular success: Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. Decades later, all three books remain in demand. Branch began his career in 1970 as a staff journalist for the Washington Monthly, Harper’s, and, Esquire. He holds honorary doctoral degrees from ten colleges and universities. Other citations include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
Cokie Roberts (1943–2019) was an American journalist, a political commentator, senior news analyst, and bestselling author. She had been cited as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting by the American Women in Radio and Television.She won the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress, and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to Who Is Ross Perot? In 2000, she won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. She and her mother, Lindy, won the Foremother Award from the National Center for Health Research in 2013. She was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 2000.
Jay Winik is the author of the New York Times bestseller April 1865, among other works. He is a senior scholar of history and public policy at the University of Maryland and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Andrew Scott Berg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American biographer. After graduating from Princeton University in 1971, he expanded his senior thesis on editor Maxwell Perkins into a full-length biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, which won a National Book Award. His third book, a highly anticipated biography of aviator Charles Lindbergh, was published in 1998 and became a New York Times bestseller, and won the Pulitzer Prize for a biography.
Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.