Ken Burns and Gregory C. Ward Recommend Great Books for Holiday Gifting

In The American Revolution: An Intimate History, prolific historians Ken Burns and Gregory C. Ward team up to take us deeper into the American Revolution than ever before, spotlighting the struggle for independence and how it’s still rippling across the nation today.

Read on for three exclusive recommendations from Ken and Gregory. When you stop by your local B&N to grab your copy of The American Revolution this holiday season, be sure to check out these great giftable reads.

The joy of reading is in part a sublime surrender to someone else’s vision, a space and time where real meaning accrues, quite apart from the fragmentation of most of our waking hours. It is focus, energy and something that keeps things fresh and new and relevant. Books make the best gifts because you’re sharing sometimes profound experiences with another, a kind of “secret” compact between the friend, the author and yourself. I’d of course recommend our newest book, The American Revolution: An Intimate History. Geoff’s writing is so good that a period smothered in sentimentality and nostalgia comes vividly to life with all its complications and complexities, but also with its intimacies and inspirational power intact. In the same vein, I’d love to celebrate the work of two of our advisors on the film by recommending their recent books: Rick Atkinson’s The Fate of the Day, his second in a trilogy of books about our Revolution (it reads like fiction), and Kathleen Duval’s Native Nations (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) which will reorient your view of the Revolution. I also love to give each year to friends and family Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom, a day by day offering of philosophical and spiritual ideas that can animate the dullest of days and sponsor real effort toward what our Founders called “the pursuit of Happiness”—lifelong learning.