New Releases by Geoffrey C Ward

In this classic of American biography, based upon thousands of original documents, many never previously published, the prize-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward tells the dramatic story of Franklin Roosevelt’s unlikely rise from cloistered youth to the brink of the presidency with a richness of detail and vivid sense of time, place, and personality usually found only in fiction. In these pages, FDR comes alive as a fond but absent father and an often unfeeling husband--the story of Eleanor Roosevelt’s struggle to build a life independent of him is chronicled in full–as well as a charming but pampered patrician trying to find his way in the sweaty world of everyday politics and all-too willing willing to abandon allies and jettison principle if he thinks it will help him move up the political ladder. But somehow he also finds within himself the courage and resourcefulness to come back from a paralysis that would have crushed a less resilient man and then go on to meet and master the two gravest crises of his time.

Before Pearl Harbor, before polio and his entry into politics, FDR was a handsome, pampered, but strong-willed youth, the center of a rarefied world. In Before the Trumpet, the award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward transports the reader to that world—Hyde Park on the Hudson and Campobello Island, Groton and Harvard and the Continent—to recreate as never before the formative years of the man who would become the 20th century’s greatest president. Here, drawn from thousands of original documents (many never previously published), is a richly-detailed, intimate biography, its central figure surrounded by a colorful cast that includes an opium smuggler and a pious headmaster; Franklin''s distant cousin, Theodore and his remarkable mother, Sara; and the still-more remarkable young woman he wooed and won, his cousin Eleanor. This is a tale that would grip the reader even if its central character had not grown up to be FDR.

Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio in the summer of 1921, resulting in permanent paralysis from the waist down. One year later, he went back to work. Noted historian Geoffrey C. Ward, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Parkman Prize and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, who is himself a polio survivor, investigates the courage and character of the man who became the greatest president of the twentieth century. “The Comeback,” a selection from A First-Class Temperament, the second volume in Ward’s monumental biography that began with Before the Trumpet, is the story of one extraordinary man’s struggle to regain his feet and reenter public life. Before his illness, FDR’s political future had seemed bright. He knew that pity was poison, that if the public understood the extent of his disability his career would be at an end. Roosevelt, therefore, had to teach himself the impossible: how to walk—or seem to walk—again. This is that journey, following the future president from his disastrous attempt to return to his law office to his triumphant march down the aisle at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, where, leaning on his crutches, he delivered the triumphant “Happy Warrior” speech for ill-fated presidential candidate Al Smith and was hailed as a hero. It was FDR’s new beginning. An eBook short.

Documents the story of Gilded Age con artist Ferdinand Ward, recounting how his large-scale pyramid operation and other sensational schemes triggered one of the greatest financial scandals in American history.

This vivid narrative history -- magnificently illustrated with more than 400 photographs, many of them never before published -- takes us on a gripping journey through the turbulent history of the region that has come to symbolize America around the world. Drawing on hundreds of letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals as well as the latest scholarship, The West presents a cast as rich and diverse as the western landscape itself: explorers and soldiers and Indian warriors, settlers and railroad builders and gaudy showmen. The book is filled with stories of heroism and hope, enterprise and adventure, as well as tragedy and disappointment. It explores the tensions between whites and the native peoples they sought to displace, but it also encompasses the Hispanic experience in the West. Gracefully written, handsomely designed, meticulously researched, The West is an unrivaled work of history that brilliantly captures all the drama and excitement, the sober realities and bright myths of the American West. Book jacket.

In this vivid biography Geoffrey C. Ward brings back to life the most celebrated — and the most reviled — African American of his age. Jack Johnson battled his way out of obscurity and poverty in the Jim Crow South to win the title of heavyweight champion of the world. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live as if color did not exist. While most blacks struggled simply to exist, he reveled in his riches and his fame, sleeping with whomever he pleased, to the consternation and anger of much of white America. Because he did so the federal government set out to destroy him, and he was forced to endure prison and seven years of exile. This definitive biography portrays Jack Johnson as he really was--a battler against the bigotry of his era and the embodiment of American individualism.

Ken Burns and geoffrey Ward bring us the history of the first American music, from its beginnings in Ragtime, Blues and Gospel, through to the present day. JAZZ has been a prism through which so much of American History can be seen - a curious and unusually objective witness to the 20th Century.

From the authors of "Jazz, Baseball, " and "The Civil War": the first fully illustrated biography of one of the central figures of literature--the American titan who gave readers Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and "Life on the Mississippi." A companion volume to the four-hour PBS television series. 150 illustrations, 40 in color.

530 illustrations in text

During the fifteen roistering years covered by two collections of letters, Clemens tried printing, piloting, mining, back-room politics, newspaper reporting, short-story writing and lecturing, and he traveled all over the west and all the way to the Sandwich Islands and back - and was never satisfied, with himself or with the work that had begun to make him famous.

Lincoln still converses with us through his writing; his carefully crafted words still most memorably define the struggle through which he led us.

On the evidence of this new study, it may be hard to like Clara Barton, but it is impossible not to admire her.

A biographer who knows it well tours Franklin Roosevelt''s home on the Hudson and finds it was not so much the President''s castle as it was his formidable mother''s.

The limitations polio impose on FDR affected every waking hour of his life from the onset of the disease in 1921 until his death, twenty-four years later.

Most Presidents seem embarrassed by the ambition that fueled their drive to power. To hear them tell it, the Presidency just happened to them, like adolescence.

Text and lavish photographs present the art and treasures of the Maharajas of India.