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Anna Weinberg

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2010 Best Books: Madison and Jefferson, by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg

by Anna Weinberg on Dec. 13, 2010

“Popular biographers tend to elevate and glamorize the Founders, seeing them through a nostalgic haze,” says Nancy Isenberg (Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, 2007, etc.), a history professor at Louisiana State University who co-wrote the dual biography of the third and the fourth presidents with her partner Andrew Burstein (The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving, 2007, etc.), also a professor of history at LSU. “As professional historians, we take issue with nonhistorians who are unfamiliar with the literature in this field and misconstrue the past,” says Isenberg. Indeed, their monumental and lucid work, which received a ...

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2010 Best Books: There is Power in a Union, by Philip Dray

by Anna Weinberg on Dec. 13, 2010

“It troubled me that the great struggle of organized labor, and the value of that struggle, have largely been forgotten or marginalized as history,” says Philip Dray (Capitol Men, 2008, etc.), of his motivation for writing a comprehensive history of the American labor movement. His narrative traces the progress of the movement from the first signs of organization in the early industrializing Republic to the height of organized labor’s power in the postwar years. “Labor unions have and can be a dynamic force for economic and social justice,” he says. “And society as a whole is better served when ...

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2010 Best Books: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

by Anna Weinberg on Dec. 13, 2010

Author and editor David Ebershoff’s first reaction on reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the stunning novel from two-time Man Booker prize nominee David Mitchell (Black Swan Green, 2006, etc.), was “exhilarated exhaustion because I had read it through the night. My second reaction was—there’s no one like David Mitchell.” In lyrical prose and stunning detail, the novel tells the tale of the eponymous, earnest young Dutchman contracted to 18th-century Japan by the Dutch East India Company and his chance encounter with an extraordinary but disfigured Japanese woman. The rich details and epic scope of ...

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2010 Best Books: A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by Jerzy Pilch

by Anna Weinberg on Dec. 13, 2010

“The books we tend to publish, and the ones I like personally, seem to confront what I think is a universal question: How do you engage with a world that you can’t change?” says Edward Van Lanen, the editor of Open Book’s translation of the acclaimed Polish author Jerzy Pilch’s 1997 classic, A Thousand Peaceful Cities, a somehow-rollicking tale of conspiracy and assassination attempts set in post-Stalinist Communist Poland in the late 1960s. The novel revolves around the amorous and apolitical teenager Jerzyk, who is unwittingly drawn into a plot—concocted by his father and his father ...

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