Audiobook Download Information
- Edition:
- Unabridged (Recorded Books)
- Length:
- 13 hours, 29 minutes
- File Size:
- 371 MB (218 files)
- Published:
- April 2001
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Summary
A New York Times best-seller, Founding Brothers is an engrossing work of nonfiction from National Book Award-winner Joseph J. Ellis. It is a book that uncovers the substance behind many of our most cherished historical tales. Here are six fascinating, well-researched chapters involving such icons as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Each chapter illuminates a particular occurrence that helped determine the course of American history while the nation was still in its infancy. Witness the infamous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr, and a secret dinner party that ended the haggling over a site for a permanent national capital.
The Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, Joseph J. Ellis draws on his expertise to craft an engaging portrait of the men who shaped democracy. Nelson Runger, acclaimed for his narrations of nonfiction works, delivers a crisp reading that breathes life back into America's founders.
Quotes from the Critics
"In lesser hands the fractious disputes and hysterical rhetoric of these contentious nation-builders might come across as hyperbolic pettiness. Ellis knows better, and he unpacks the real issues for his readers, revealing the driving assumptions and riveting fears that animated Americans' first encounter with the organized ideologies and interests we call parties." - Washington Post Book World
"This kind of episodic history, combined with Ellis's evocative prose and appreciation for historical contingency, has the effect of giving the reader a sense of actually being a witness to the events as they unfold. Ellis recovers the drama, the romance and tragedy, the sense of fragility and imminent danger confronted by the fledgling nation during its turbulent first decade." - Times Literary Supplement
"This is a splendid book--humane, learned, written with flair and radiant with a calm intelligence and wit. Even those familiar with ''the Revolutionary generation'' will, I would warrant, find much in its pages to captivate and enlarge their understanding of our nation's fledgling years." - New York Times Book Review
"[A] remarkable set of very engaging stories that can be read independently of one another....[A] wonderful book, one of the best collections of essays on the Founders ever written." - New York Review of Books
"[A] lively and illuminating, if somewhat arbitrary book that leaves the reader with a visceral sense of a formative era in American life.[Ellis] has written a shrewd, insightful book, less a conventional work of history than a series of strobe-lighted snapshots of a historical era and its illustrious and less-than-illustrious leaders." - New York Times
"Encounters and correspondence shape Ellis' masterful narrative. He returns to the founders' writings to convey their sense of the nation as an unfinished and fragile thing.....By going back to events as they happened, he brings alive the oft-told tales of the early nation." - Chicago Tribune Books
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