Books by H. W. Brands and Complete Book Reviews

Michael West, Author, H. W. Brands, Author . Doubleday $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-385-50928-2
West was once asked by a journalist: "Just what does it mean to play God?" The author, whose controversial career in therapeutic cloning has been chronicled extensively by the media, seeks to respond in a brisk memoir that describes a boy...
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H.W. Brands. Anchor, $15 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-307-74326-8
The relationship of Aaron Burr and his daughter Theodosia Burr Alston is one of the most affecting bonds in the history of major American political figures. Each cherished and doted on the other after the death of Burr’s wife when their daughter was
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H. W. Brands, Author . Doubleday $29.95 (560p) ISBN 978-0-385-50216-0
The gold rush of 1848, says Brands, was a watershed in American history, helping mold the country into its modern shape, transforming the wilderness and pushing the country into civil war. Noted biographer Brands (his life of Benjamin Franklin, The...
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H.W. Brands. Doubleday, $30 (448p) ISBN 978-0-385-54057-5
Brands (Reagan), professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, expounds on President Truman’s decision, in April 1951, to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then the UN commander in Korea, after months of listening to him threaten to expand...
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H.W. Brands. Doubleday, $35 (736p) ISBN 978-0-385-53241-9
This authoritative biography of an obscure failure and occasional drunkard who became a Civil War generalissimo and the 18th U. S. president is a study in two kinds of moral courage. The first infused Grant’s military leadership with decisiveness,...
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H. W. Brands, Author Basic Books $35 (912p) ISBN 978-0-465-06958-3
At 35, after failing at cattle ranching in the Dakotas and a career lagging in Washington in minor political office, Roosevelt (1858-1919) was offered an appointment by the mayor of New York City as commissioner of street cleaning. ""If the job had...
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H. W. Brands, Author HarperCollins Publishers $25.95 (750p) ISBN 978-0-312-13594-2
The decade of the 1890s is quite compelling; it represents the high flowering of an older, quaint America together with social, political, and intellectual trends that would move the nation rapidly into the modernity familiar to us today. Brands (his
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H. W. Brands, Author Oxford University Press, USA $35 (256p) ISBN 978-0-19-507499-4
In this thought-provoking, controversial study, Brands charges that the responsibility for fomenting the Cold War, and especially for its prolongation, rests heavily on the United States. The Cold War, he argues, was fueled by the endless search for
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H. W. Brands, Author Doubleday Books $35 (768p) ISBN 978-0-385-49328-4
""Franklin's story is the story of a manDan exceedingly gifted man and a most engaging one. It is also the story of the birth of AmericaDan America this man discovered in himself, then helped create in the world at large,"" says Texas A&M historian...
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H. W. Brands, Author Free Press $26 (368p) ISBN 978-0-684-85473-1
Readers who can imagine a favorite history professor sitting across the table talking about the evolution of American business will have a pretty good idea of the style, substance and approach taken by Brands, a history professor at Texas A&M....
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H. W. Brands, Author Oxford University Press, USA $35 (352p) ISBN 978-0-19-506707-1
As director of the State Department's division of Near Eastern and African affairs, Loy Henderson (1896-1986) played an important role in the creation of the Truman Doctrine which, according to Brands, served as ``the blueprint of America's anti-comm
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H.W. Brands, Doubleday, $35 (624p) ISBN 978-0-385-52333-2
In this timely study, University of Texas historian Brands (Traitor to His Class) describes the rise of the great corporate capitalists after the Civil War. J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie constituted an trinity of power-
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H. W. Brands, Author . Penguin Press $35 (432p) ISBN 978-1-59420-262-9
Though this crisp, informal narrative overview of the last half-century of American history is long on story and short on analysis, it does its job well. Bringing his trademark clarity to the tales he tells, bestselling historian Brands (The First...
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H. W. Brands, Author . Doubleday $35 (896p) ISBN 978-0-385-51958-8
It is unfortunate for University of Texas historian Brands (Andrew Jackson ) that his serviceable biography of Franklin Roosevelt comes on the heels of Jean Smith's magisterial Francis Parkman Prize winner, FDR (2007). Still, Brands provides...
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H. W. Brands, Author . Atlas/Norton $23.95 (239p) ISBN 978-0-393-06184-0
Brands appraises five key players in American financial history: Alexander Hamilton, who advocated federal assumption of state Revolutionary War debt through the establishment of a national bank; Nicholas Biddle, who presided over the Bank of the...
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H. W. Brands, Author . Doubleday $35 (620p) ISBN 978-0-385-50738-7
Historian Brands, author of the bestselling The First American : The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin , now turns to Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), illuminating both the mettle of a fascinating leader and the crucible in which American...
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H. W. Brands, Author . Doubleday $29.95 (592p) ISBN 978-0-385-50737-0
Nicely told as it is, this story could have been written 50 years ago. What's frustrating in this telling is that none of the advances in perspective that would make the work attractive to a general and mixed audience today are to be found in it.
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H. W. Brands, Author . Yale Univ. $22.50 (224p) ISBN 978-0-300-09021-5
Defining liberalism somewhat simplistically as "a prevailing confidence in the ability of government—preeminently the federal government—to accomplish substantial good on behalf of the American people," Brands argues that...
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H. W. Brands, Author, Chuck Montgomery, Read by , read by Chuck Montgomery. Random House Audio $39.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-7393-2169-0
Sounding like a schoolteacher whiling away a snowy winter's day in his classroom by sharing a historic tale with his students, Montgomery reads Brands's life of the nation's seventh president with careful attention and understated...
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H. W. Brands, Author, Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., Editor Times Books $22 (192p) ISBN 978-0-8050-6955-6
At a time when U.S. foreign policy and the country's role in the world are very much at issue, what could be more appropriate than to revisit the president who set U.S. foreign policy on its course in the 20th century? Brands, best-selling author...
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