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Originally Posted by pshrynk
David McCullough's books are all pretty much very readable and anjoyable. Path Between the Seas, Truman, and John Adams are three that I have read.
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I was going to say the same.I enjoyed "Truman" exceedingly. The author has a gift of unleashing a weave of very interesting and well researched narrative and material, it is no wonder that he is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
I have also heard great things about William Manchester's "American Caesar" which is a biography of Douglas MacArthur.Other than McCullough, Manchester was the only author whom two highly respected and somewhat overly conflicting historians agreed on being one of the top 5 American history authors of the last 100 years.It will be interesting to read about MacArthur's side of the story about his differences with Truman.
I also have on my list Ted Sorensen's "Counselor". It promises to be interesting, if anything just to see how Mr. Sorensen, J.F Kennedy's counsel and alleged ghostwriter of "Profiles in Courage" will address the accusation, most notably from CBS' Mike Wallace ( "60 Minutes" and also in his book and it's accompanying DVD "Between Me and You")
I am also interested in the thoughts of foreign leaders and current events, and the middle east is a hot region now, so I will read former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf "In The Line Of Fire". Just to get his perspective and If nothing else see how can a man cling to power with so much violence and repeated assasination attempts.
By now you can tell I love biographies, If I will have the time I would probably take on "Gray Wolf: The Life of Kemal Ataturk" the secular Turks revere him while the religious are not so crazy about him.This book inspired Anwar Sadat so much it changed his life.I want to know the challenges of nation building in Ataturk's time, and how did he persuade a Muslim country deeply rooted in the traditions of the Ottoman empire and the epitomy of ombudsmanship into one of the best examples of secularism in the Muslim world.
But first I have to finish Samuel Huntington's critically acclaimed masterpiece "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order"
By the way Fareed Zakaria's "The Post American World" is a good read, if one can argue that it is just a clever update (more facts and figures, more recent events and interconnections) on his late Professor's epic book "The Clash of Civilizations"
What do you think?