Category: Great Projects

David McCullough has long been one of my favorite popular historians. He can turn almost any event into a compulsively readable, character-driven adventure story. “The Wright Brothers” (2015) was written in McCullough’s twilight years (he died in 2022) and it isn’t nearly as commanding or dense as his earlier award-winning works, like “Truman” (1992) or…

hadn’t read anything by David McCullough in several years and had forgotten just how masterful a storyteller he is. The Great Bridge, published in 1972 as McCullough’s second major historical work, remains a towering achievement in narrative nonfiction and has earned its place at #48 on The Modern Library’s list of the “100 Best Non-Fiction…

The Erie Canal was the first “grand project” of the American republic, paving the way for other monumental national engineering achievements, from the transcontinental railroad and the Panama Canal to the Manhattan Project and Apollo mission. Peter Bernstein, a writer known more for his skill in making financial and monetary issues comprehensible to the mass…

I certainly wouldn’t rank the late Stephen Ambrose as one of the best American historians of his generation, but he may very well be the best-selling. In “Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869,” he brings his skill at telling the human side of warfare to one of…

John Barry writes tremendous character-driven historical narratives. He is perhaps best known for his 2004 bestseller “The Great Influenza” about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which returned to the bestseller list in 2020 as COVID-19 swept the globe. “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America” came out in 1997…

Great projects can make for great reading. I loved reading about the building of the Erie Canal (Bernstein), the transcontinental railroad (Bain), the Brooklyn Bridge (McCullough), and the Panama Canal (McCullough again). With “Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century,” Michael Hiltzik takes his place in this esteemed circle of bestselling historians.…

I love well researched, character-driven narratives about great projects. Notable examples include David McCollough on the building of the Panama Canal (1977) and Brooklyn Bridge (1972), David Haward Bain on the transcontinental railroad (1999), Richard Rhodes on the Manhattan Project (1986), Peter Bernstein on the Erie Canal (2006), and Michael Hiltzik on the Hoover Dam…