Fred Kaplan
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The engaging biography of one of the most celebrated and enduring authors of Western literature Charles Dickens grew up in harsh poverty and became one of the world's most beloved authors. Biographer Fred Kaplan takes a brilliant, multifaceted approach in his examination of Dickens's life: his fraught marriage and relationships; the ever-present effects of his humble beginnings; his extensive, but carefully managed, public life; and his friendships...
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"A fine, invaluable book. . . . Certain to become essential to our understanding of the 16th president. . . . Kaplan meticulously analyzes how Lincoln's steadily maturing prose style enabled him to come to grips with slavery and, as his own views evolved, to express his deepening opposition to it." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
For Abraham Lincoln, whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered....
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As he did for Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams, award-winning biographer Fred Kaplan offers a fresh, illuminating look at the life of Thomas Jefferson and his contributions as a writer.
In this unique biography, Fred Kaplan emphasizes Thomas Jefferson’s genius with language and his ability to use the power of words to inspire and shape a nation. A man renowned for many talents, writing was one of the major activities of the statemen’s life,...
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America's power is in decline, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past few years is well known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. Celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan explains the grave misconceptions that enabled George W. Bush and his aides to get so far off track, and traces the genesis and evolution of these ideas from the era of Nixon through Reagan to the...
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Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed America
While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that followed. Pop culture exploded in upheaval with the rise...
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An absorbing study of the evolution of sentiment in Victorian life and literature What is sentimentality, and where did it come from? For acclaimed scholar and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds were planted by the British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians gained from them a theory of human nature, a belief in the innateness of benevolent moral instincts; sentiment, in turn, emerged as a set of shared moral feelings in opposition...
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The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning portrait of the Victorian writer and historian Thomas Carlyle A Pulitzer finalist that draws upon years of research and unpublished letters, Thomas Carlyle examines the life of the Victorian genius. Carlyle was the author of Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution: A History, and he possessed one of literature's most flamboyant prose styles. Despite a childhood beset by anxiety and illness, Carlyle...
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This is the untold story of the small group of men who have devised the plans and shaped the policies on how to use the Bomb. The book (first published in 1983) explores the secret world of these strategists of the nuclear age and brings to light a chapter in American political and military history never before revealed.
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Fred Kaplan's insightful biography of the inimitable and brilliant Gore Vidal Few writers of recent memory have distinguished themselves in so many fields, and so consummately, as Gore Vidal. A prolific novelist, Vidal also wrote for film and theater, and became a classic essayist of his own time, delivering prescient analyses of American society, politics, and culture. Known for his rapier wit and intelligence, Vidal moved with ease among the cultural...
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A stunning biography of the magisterial author behind The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors Henry James is an absorbing portrait of one of the most complex and influential nineteenth-century American writers. Fred Kaplan examines James's brilliant and troubled family-from his brother, a famous psychologist, to his sister, who fought with mental illness-and charts its influence on the development of the artist and his work. The biography includes...
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Based on previously unavailable documents and interviews with more than one hundred key players, including General David Petraeus, The Insurgents unfolds against the backdrop of two wars waged against insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the main insurgency is the one led at home by a new generation of officers-including Petraeus, John Nagl, David Kilcullen, and H. R. McMaster-who were seized with an idea on how to fight these kinds of "small...
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A brilliant combination of literary analysis and historical detail, this masterfully written biography of the much misunderstood sixth president of the United States reveals the many sides of this forward-thinking man whose progressive vision helped shape the course of America.
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"The acclaimed biographer, with a thought-provoking exploration of how Abraham Lincolnâs and John Quincy Adamsâ experiences with slavery and race shaped their differing viewpoints, provides both perceptive insights into these two great presidents and a revealing perspective on race relations in modern America. Lincoln, who in afterlife became mythologized as the Great Emancipator, was shaped by the values of the white America into which...
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2020.
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Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as "a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter," takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's "Tank" in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories-based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents-of how America's presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely...
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[2013]
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The Insurgents is the inside story of the small group of soldier-scholars, led by General David Petraeus, who plotted to revolutionize one of the largest, oldest, and most hidebound institutions - the United States military. Their aim was to build a new Army that could fight the new kind of war in the post-Cold War age: not massive wars on vast battlefields, but "small wars" in cities and villages, against insurgents and terrorists. These would be...