Book cover of To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders

Book description

Two time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bernard Bailyn has distilled a lifetime of study into this brilliant illumination of the ideas and world of the Founding Fathers. In five succinct essays he reveals the origins, depth, and global impact of their extraordinary creativity.

The opening essay illuminates the central importance of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked To Begin the World Anew as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Enormous insight from one of the great scholars of America’s Revolutionary Era, especially as to the complex ruminations and motivations of the nation’s founders as they set out to invent a new society. At the core of their inspiration, ironically resulting from their very provincialism, being separated from European society by an ocean, was their ability to combine a deep sense of pragmatic realism with “a pervasive air of utopian idealism.” From this was formed a nation consistently looking to a better future. A sensibility perhaps best expressed by Thomas Jefferson: “I like the dreams of the future better than…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman by Alexis Krasilovsky,

Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.

A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…

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Dark Fae Outcast by Autumn M. Birt,

Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.

But while scoring his last…

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