Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History - REVIEW

by S.C. Gwynne

In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all. S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.

Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun.

The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being.

Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend.

S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.

Scribner
ISBN-13: 978-1416591054

Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War - REVIEW

by S.C. Gwynne

The fourth and final year of the Civil War offers one of the most compelling narratives and one of history’s great turning points. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist S.C. Gwynne breathes new life into the epic battle between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant; the advent of 180,000 black soldiers in the Union army; William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea; the rise of Clara Barton; the election of 1864 (which Lincoln nearly lost); the wild and violent guerrilla war in Missouri; and the dramatic final events of the war, including Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

“A must-read for Civil War enthusiasts” (Publishers Weekly), Hymns of the Republic offers many surprising angles and insights. Robert E. Lee, known as a great general and Southern hero, is presented here as a man dealing with frustration, failure, and loss. Ulysses S. Grant is known for his prowess as a field commander, but in the final year of the war he largely fails at that. His most amazing accomplishments actually began the moment he stopped fighting. William Tecumseh Sherman, Gwynne argues, was a lousy general, but probably the single most brilliant man in the war. We also meet a different Clara Barton, one of the greatest and most compelling characters, who redefined the idea of medical care in wartime. And proper attention is paid to the role played by large numbers of black union soldiers—most of them former slaves.

Scribner
ISBN-13: 978-1501116223

The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy - REVIEW

by Jon Gordon

The Energy Bus, an international best seller by Jon Gordon, takes readers on an enlightening and inspiring ride that reveals 10 secrets for approaching life and work with the kind of positive, forward thinking that leads to true accomplishment at work and at home. Jon infuses this engaging story with keen insights as he provides a powerful roadmap to overcome adversity and bring out the best in yourself and your team. When you get on The Energy Bus you’ll enjoy the ride of your life.

Wiley
ISBN-13: 978-0470100288

The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues - REVIEW

by Patrick M. Lencioni

In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player.

In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. 

Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players.  Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.

Jossey-Bass
ISBN-13: 978-1119209591

Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) - REVIEW

by Sam Wineburg

Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.

With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history  to do? Sam Wineburg has answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades. If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we have to explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows us in Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments—including surveys of students, recent attempts to update history curricula, and analyses of how historians, students, and even fact checkers approach online sources—to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.

It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.

About the Author - Sam Wineburg

Sam Wineburg (samwineburg.com) is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University. In the words of Lee Shulman, past president of the Carnegie Foundation, Wineburg “has not merely contributed to our understanding of how history is created, taught and learned; he has nearly single-handedly forged a distinctive field of research and a new educational literature.” Wineburg's interdisciplinary scholarship sits at the crossroads of three fields: history, cognitive science, and education, and his writing has appeared in such diverse outlets as Cognitive Science, the Journal of American History, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, and the Smithsonian. His work has been featured on C-SPAN, NPR, ABC News, the BBC, and stories about his work have appeared in newspapers throughout the world. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he earned his PhD at Stanford in Psychological Studies in Education. In 2002, his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for scholarship that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.” He is the founder of the Stanford History Education Group (sheg.stanford.edu), whose free curriculum has been downloaded more than 14 million times. In 2007, he was awarded the American Historical Association’s “William Gilbert Prize” and in 2008 the “James Harvey Robinson Prize,” for the most important scholarship on the teaching of history and the most important teaching innovation, respectively. In 2013, he was inducted into the National Academy of Education and also named the Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Commission and spent four months crisscrossing India lecturing about his work. In 2018, his research group created a state-of-the-art curriculum on digital literacy (cor.stanford.edu) that has been recognized by UNESCO with its "Global Media and Information Literacy" award and been downloaded by thousands of schools all over the globe.

University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13: ‏ 978-0226357218

The Sergeant: The Incredible Life of Nicholas Said: Son of an African General, Slave of the Ottomans, Free Man Under the Tsars, Hero of the Union Army - REVIEW

by Dean Calbreath

From his noble childhood in the kingdom of Borno to being kidnapped into slavery, the inspiring life-story of Nicholas Said is an epic journey that takes him from Africa and the Ottoman Empire through Czarist Russia and, finally, to heroic acclaim in the American Civil War.

In the late 1830s a young Black man was born into a world of wealth and privilege in the powerful, thousand-year-old African kingdom of Borno. But instead of becoming a respected general like his fearsome father (who was known as The Lion), Nicolas Said’s fate was to fight a very different kind of battle. 

At the age of thirteen, Said was kidnapped and sold into slavery, beginning an epic journey that would take him across Africa, Asia, Europe, and eventually the United States, where he would join one of the first African American regiments in the Union Army. Nicholas Said would then spend the rest of his life fighting for equality. Along the way, Said encountered such luminaries as Queen Victoria and Czar Nicholas I, fought Civil War battles that would turn the war for the North, established schools to educate newly freed Black children, and served as one of the first Black voting registrars.

In The Sergeant, Said’s epic (and largely unknown) story is brought to light by globe-trotting, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Dean Calbreath in a meticulously researched and approachable biography. Through the lens of Said’s continent-crossing life, Calbreath examines the parallels and differences in the ways slavery was practiced from a global and religious perspective, and he highlights how Said’s experiences echo the discrimination, segregation, and violence that are still being reckoned with today. 

There has never been a more voracious appetite for stories documenting the African American experience, and The Sergeant’s unique perspective of slavery from a global perspective will resonate with a wide audience.

Dean Calbreath was part of the Polk- and Pulitzer-winning team that uncovered the biggest individual bribery scandal in Congressional history. With fellow journalists Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer, they co-wrote The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught (Public Affairs). Calbreath has earned numerous awards over the past three decades for investigative, historical, and international reporting. Calbreath is also an experienced public speaker, from delivering lectures at leading colleges and universities to appearances on television, radio talk shows, and podcasts.

Pegasus Books
ISBN-13: 978-1639363247

Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy - REVIEW

by Clarence Lusane

Twenty Dollars and Change places Harriet Tubman’s life and legacy in a long tradition of resistance, illuminating the ongoing struggle to realize a democracy in which her emancipatory vision prevails.

America is in the throes of a historic reckoning with racism, with the battle for control over official narratives at ground zero. Across the country, politicians, city councils, and school boards are engaged in a highly polarized debate about whose accomplishments should be recognized, and whose point of view should be included in the telling of America’s history.

In Twenty Dollars and Change, political scientist Clarence Lusane, author of the acclaimed The Black History of the White House, writes from a basic premise: Racist historical narratives and pervasive social inequities are inextricably linked—changing one can transform the other. Taking up the debate over the future of the twenty-dollar bill, Lusane uses the question of Harriet Tubman vs. Andrew Jackson as a lens through which to view the current state of our nation's ongoing reckoning with the legacies of slavery and foundational white supremacy. He places the struggle to confront unjust social conditions in direct connection with the push to transform our public symbols, making it plain that any choice of whose life deserves to be remembered and honored is a direct reflection of whose basic rights are deemed worthy of protection, and whose are not.

"Engaging and insightful, Twenty Dollars and Change illuminates the grassroots effort to have our national currency reflect the diversity of America and all of its citizens—those ordinary and extraordinary people who have stood up and demanded freedom, equality and justice. A must read!"—Kate Clifford Larson, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero

City Lights Publishers
ISBN-13: 978-0872868854

The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas - REVIEW

by Daniel Kiel

Every Supreme Court transition presents an opportunity for a shift in the balance of the third branch of American government, but the replacement of Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas in 1991 proved particularly momentous. Not only did it shift the ideological balance on the Court; it was inextricably entangled with the persistent American dilemma of race. In The Transition, this most significant transition is explored through the lives and writings of the first two African American justices on Court, touching on the lasting consequences for understandings of American citizenship as well as the central currents of Black political thought over the past century.

In their lives, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas experienced the challenge of living and learning in a world that had enslaved their relatives and that continued to subjugate members of their racial group. On the Court, their judicial writings―often in concurrences or dissents―richly illustrate the ways in which these two individuals embodied these crucial American (and African American) debates―on the balance between state and federal authority, on the government's responsibility to protect its citizens against discrimination, and on the best strategies for pursuing justice. The gap between Justices Marshall and Thomas on these questions cannot be overstated, and it reveals an extraordinary range of thought that has yet to be fully appreciated.

The 1991 transition from Justice Marshall to Justice Thomas has had consequences that are still unfolding at the Court and in society. Arguing that the importance of this transition has been obscured by the relegation of these Justices to the sidelines of Supreme Court history, Daniel Kiel shows that it is their unique perspective as Black justices – the lives they have lived as African Americans and the rooting of their judicial philosophies in the relationship of government to African Americans – that makes this succession echo across generations.

Stanford University Press
ISBN-13: 978-1503630659