Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize
In what is arguably his greatest book, America's most heroically ambitious writer follows
the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's
prisons who became notorious for two reasons: first, for robbing two men in 1976, then
killing them in cold blood; and, second, after being tried and convicted, for insisting on
dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on
keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.
Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his
procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a
restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The
Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of
American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes's acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance. Rich with anecdotal evidence, piercing analysis, and a truly astonishing range of erudition, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is a "picture of enormous sweep and brilliant insight" (Kenneth Arrow) as well as one of the most audaciously ambitious works of history in decades.

A rich and lively survey of the great families who rule industry by the acclaimed author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
Through perseverance, solid ingenuity, and unwavering determination, family-run companies— dynasties—have dominated wealth and business throughout the last two centuries. One third of Fortune 500 firms are family owned and, in most cases, the ideal of the family business is one synonymous with continuity, watchful leadership, and dedication to success. But what happens when bad behavior, extravagance, and laziness—all very real enemies of industry—are allowed to proliferate?
In Dynasties, bestselling author and historian David S. Landes scrutinizes the powerful family businesses that rule both the financial and industrial sectors across Europe, Japan, and America to determine what factors can cause a dynasty to flourish or fail. Focusing on three areas—banking, automobiles, and raw materials—his cast of characters speaks to the power of the family enterprise: Ford, Rothschild, Morgan, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Toyoda are but a few whose histories contain all the drama and passion expected when exorbitant money, power, and kinship intersect. Drawing on his immense knowledge of economic history, Landes offers a new reading of the dynastic business plan of the last two centuries—with surprising recommendations for the coming one.

Lawyer, doctor, scientist--these are the jobs Americans commonly cite when asked to list the most prestigious occupations. The word "professional" today implies expertise, authority, and excellence. To do a job professionally is to do it well. Yet in a society in which knowledge has become a prized asset and an advanced degree the ticket to wealth and power, the rise of professionalism has a darker, more ominous side.
Power in the Highest Degree, one of the most comprehensive studies of professionals ever undertaken, exposes professionalism as a double-edged sword; it illustrates how experts have come to "own" and control knowledge, much like the wealthy control capital, thereby transforming capitalist and socialist society, both for better and for worse. Knowledge long predates money as a source of power and wealth in human society, and professionals are only the most recent in a long succession of powerful knowledge classes that have included shaman, witchdoctors, and the Confucian mandarins who ruled China for over a thousand years.
Drawing on interviews with over 1,000 practicing professionals, the authors show how, by dispensing self-interested and morally colored judgements as scientific truth, modern professionals are consolidating a monopoly over what passes for objective knowledge. Experts discredit the ordinary knowledge of the general public to generate a vast market of dependent clients. The result is a powerful professional class that creates vital new knowledge and life-saving services, but also wields growing influence over a population deeply insecure about its ability to manage private and public affairs without "expert" guidance.
This sweeping study also reveals that more and more experts are abandoning private practice to work for corporations, becoming junior partners in a new "Mandarin capitalism." While often outspoken advocates of a more socially responsible business world, professionals have joined big business to produce one of the most pronounced divisions of mental and manual work in history, creating a new dispossessed majority, the uncredentialed. We learn of an experiment at Polaroid to give machine operators more responsibility which is cancelled when managers and engineers decided that they "just didn't want operators that qualified." The authors argue that, as this new "mandarin" class radically transforms the social order, it helps to reform some of the traditional scourges of the business world, but also poses a new threat to equality in America. To reverse this trend, they propose a post-professional society that de-emphasizes skill hierarchies and substantially democratizes knowledge.
A bold and incisive new work of social criticism, this book provides a fascinating look at the modern professional and provokes Americans to think in a new way about democracy in the age of experts.

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Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution. Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.

For more than ten years, John Steele Gordon has written the widely read "The Business of America" column in "American Heritage" magazine. Marked by a combination of erudition, wit, and eloquence, Gordon's stories have celebrated the high points, and occasional low points, in the history of business in this country, from colonial days to the present. Now, the best of his mini-histories have been gathered in one volume. As much as each stands on its own, together they gain in significance as they go beyond mere business to present an intriguing lens on the broad sweep of American history. Gordon deftly connects the past with the present as he compares Frederick Philipse's successful cornering of the wampum market in 1666 with the Hunt brothers' failed attempt to corner the silver market in 1979. He looks anew at famous industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Henry Ford, and uncovers little-remembered heroes such as Oliver Evans, the founding father of the American industrial revolution, and Samuel Slater, who launched the textile industry in this country. He revels alike in the stories of philanthropist Peter Cooper, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and the father of television syndication, Desi Arnaz. Gordon reveals how broad trends have developed (government debt and inflation, for example) and how specific words (boondoggle, pork barrel) have entered our language. He even tells the story of America's greatest cheese, Liederkranz, now lost forever. In addition to being a superb historian, John Steele Gordon is a great storyteller. Surveying almost 400 years of enterprise on this continent, "The Business of America" makes invaluable connections between eras and allows us a new appreciation of the richness of the American story.

For more than two hundred years, fortunes have been made -- and lost -- on Wall Street by men and women playing the great game of capitalism. Many have repeated the mistakes of their forebears, and some have enjoyed similar triumphs. In this gripping and informative book, John Steele Gordon tells history lovers, armchair investors, financiers, and day traders alike everything they need to know about Wall Street's wild ride to power.
Wall Street began as the northern line of defense for a wilderness trading post, at a time when money was limited to gold, silver, and Indian wampum. Today, Wall Street is a metaphor for the global financial market, and money exists mostly on computer screens. More than three million Americans are now employed by the securities industry, and Wall Street wields the sort of power once reserved to nation states. How did an unimpressive little byway become so formidable? In this richly textured narrative history, John Steele Gordon brings to life the remarkable cast of bankers and brokers, visionaries and crooks who made it happen.
Nature gave New York one of the world's great harbors, and the Dutch founders gave the city its enduring love of making money. In pursuit of that love, New Yorkers began meeting under the trees and lampposts of Wall Street to buy and sell securities. As the country expanded westward, canal and railroad companies came to Wall Street looking for capital. Later still, manufacturers came as well, and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had the mightiest national economy in the world. No small part of that development was due to Wall Street, which, time and again, has demonstrated how Adam Smith's invisible hand turns the pursuit of economic self-interest into common wealth.
Gordon tells the fascinating stories of the key players of the Great Game, including Jacob Little, the first great Wall Street plunger; Commodore Vanderbilt, the Street's greatest tactician; Hetty Green, the "richest woman in the world," who was terrified of being poor; J. P. Morgan, the country's most important banker, who twice saved it from economic disaster when the government couldn't; Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, who was a thief; and Charles E. Merrill, who brought Wall Street to Main Street and transformed both in the process. From Alexander Hamilton to Michael Milken, the history of Wall Street is a history of risk, courage, avarice, patriotism, power, genius, and even, occasionally, remarkable stupidity.
Wall Street has finally found a biographer worthy of her extraordinary story in acclaimed business historian John Steele Gordon. As more and more Americans invest their money in the stock market, The Great Game is a lively and absorbing account of how Wall Street became a crucial part of all our lives.

Today, in a world in which news flashes around the globe in an instant, time lags are inconceivable. In the mid-nineteenth century, communication between the United States and Europe -- the center of world affairs -- was only as quick as the fastest ship could cross the Atlantic, making the United States isolated and vulnerable. But in 1866, the Old and New Worlds were united by the successful laying of a cable across the Atlantic. John Steele Gordon's book chronicles this extraordinary achievement -- the brainchild of American businessman Cyrus Field and one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. An epic struggle, it required a decade of effort, numerous failed attempts, millions of dollars in capital, a near disaster at sea, the overcoming of seemingly insurmountable technological problems, and uncommon physical, financial, and intellectual courage. Bringing to life an overlooked story in the annals of technology, John Steele Gordon sheds fascinating new light on this American saga that literally changed the world.

During the nineteenth century, the roughest but most important ocean passage in the world lay between Britain and the United States. Bridging the Atlantic Ocean by steamship was a defining, remarkable feat of the era. Over time, Atlantic steamships became the largest, most complex machines yet devised. They created a new transatlantic world of commerce and travel, reconciling former Anglo-American enemies and bringing millions of emigrants who transformed the United States. In Transatlantic , the experience of crossing the Atlantic is re-created in stunning detail from the varied perspectives of first class, steerage, officers, and crew. The dynamic evolution of the Atlantic steamer is traced from Brunel's Great Western of 1838 to Cunard's Mauretania of 1907, the greatest steamship ever built.

In a book written out of a passionate belief in the staying powers of the democratic principles, a noted historian has written a major work that may be described as an interpretation of American thought and character since the 1880s. "Impressive in its inclusive sweep."-Joseph Wood Krutch, New York Times

Review
In this expostulatory essay on the European and American philosophes of the 18th century, a dean of American historiography contrasts the European profession of the Enlightenment with down-to-earth American accomplishments. English intellectualism, according to Commager, was an aristocratic exercise exemplified by Royal Society director Joseph Banks' belief that science should supersede politics; Americans, of course, believed in plebian democracy, freedom of speech, and the abandonment of Greek and Latin for botany and husbandry: they were euphorically venturing westward while Europe looked toward ancient, stagnant civilizations like China's. True, the Old World had Goethe, Priestley, Kant - but the reality was that "cities are put to the torch, nobles ride heedless over the fields of peasants, the Irish cotters starve to death. . . ." Americans, with "no King, no Court, no aristocracy, no body of laws, no professional army, no Established Church, no history, no tradition, no usable past" created a nationalism from the bottom up. Thomas Jefferson is exalted as the native philosophe embodying this development, while less is made of Franklin's collaboration with his European counterparts. It is easy to challenge Commager's hyperboles about direct democracy in the early Republic and his notion that America lacked tradition; his contrast between European decadence and American practicality is more nuanced but fundamentally adds little to our knowledge of either. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The foremost American historian of his generation delves into the nation's European origins, illuminating how the new country embodied the principles of the Enlightenment--ideals that Europe, trapped by tradition and privilege, could not itself realize. "...crystalline clarity of...writing [causes] explosions in the reader's mind...history to be pondered and cherished."--The New York Times. "Learning and reason are at the service of a mind whose understanding of democracy gains brilliance and power from a passion for...freedom."--Arthur Schlesinger Jr.