Editorial Reviews
Product Description
A landmark event in the history of American letters: the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s extraordinary, revelatory, never-before-seen journals. For more than a half century, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has been at the vital center of American political and cultural life. From his entrance into political leadership circles in the 1950s through his years in the Kennedy administration and up to the present, he has been that rare thing-a great historian who has enjoyed an extraordinary eyewitness vantage on history as it has been made. On intimate terms with many of the most prominent political, cultural, and intellectual figures of the last fifty years, he is a man whose proximity to power has never obscured his appreciation for the reality of those who don't have it. For that capacity for empathy and for much else, he has been called American liberalism's greatest voice. For nearly fifty years, from the early 1950s through the late 1990s, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., recorded his experiences and opinions in his journals. Edited by his two oldest sons into a beautifully packaged two-volume work, the journals offer remarkably fresh and lucid observations on a half century of public life and a rare and privileged view into the mind of one of America's most distinguished men of letters. They form an intimate history of postwar America, from Schlesinger's days working on both of Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns and his years in the Kennedy White House through to the Clinton administration. These are not personal journals of the "where I had lunch" variety; this is one of twentieth-century America's greatest moral and intellectual forces chronicling the big stories of his and our time, usually from the inside out. Their publication is truly a landmark event and a fitting opportunity to celebrate a most extraordinary American life.
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