In The Fords: An American Epic, Peter Collier and David Horowitz tell the riveting story of three generations of Fords, a dramatic story of conflict between fathers and sons played out against the backdrop of America's greatest industrial empire. The story begins with the first Henry Ford, the mechanical wizard, tinkerer and "mad genius" who drove the automobile into the heart of American life he had become an embittered crank who so possessively loved the company he built that when his son, Edsel, tried to change it to suit the changing times, Henry destroyed him. It was left to Edsel's son Henry II to avenge him and save the Ford Motor Company in the postwar world.

Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Harriman, Gould, Frick...this is the story of the giant american capitalists who seized economic power after the Civil War and altered the shape of american life forever. Index.

“ Blood Feud rivals A Civil Action for best non-fiction book of the past twenty years.” — John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of Damage Procrit seemed like a biotech miracle, promising a golden age in medical care. Developed in the 1980s by Amgen and licensed to the pharmaceutical giant, Johnson & Johnson, the drug (AKA Epogen and Aranesp) soon generated billions in annual revenue—and still does. In 2012, world famous cyclist, Olympian, and Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong was banned from professional cycling on doping charges for using EPO (the blanket name for the drugs Procrit and Epogen), resulting in a global controversy about abuse, big pharmaceutical companies, and the lies and inaccuracies concerning performance-enhancing drugs. Mark Duxbury was a J&J salesman who once believed in the blood-booster, setting record sales and winning company awards. Then Duxbury started to learn unsavory truths about Procrit and J&J’s business practices. He was fired and filed a whistleblower suit to warn the public. When Jan Schlichtman ( A Civil Action ) learned of Duxbury’s crusade, he signed on. Now, he’s fighting on behalf of cancer patients and for every American who trusts Big Pharma with his life.

Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common (and decent, and hard-working) man. Abe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. He was given to swearing off things—coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses, such as "May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation." Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical "You might as well be a mensch." Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly. The author's unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir, Messages from My Father .

Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family. It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream.

"Orenstein is such a breezy, funny writer, it's easy to forget she's an important thinker too."--People In this lively, funny memoir, Peggy Orenstein sets out to make a sweater from scratch--shearing, spinning, dyeing wool--and in the process discovers how we find our deepest selves through craft. Orenstein spins a yarn that will appeal to everyone. The COVID pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater. Orenstein hoped the project would help her process not just wool but her grief over the recent death of her mother and the decline of her dad, the impending departure of her college-bound daughter, and other thorny issues of aging as a woman in a culture that by turns ignores and disdains them. What she didn't expect was a journey into some of the major issues of our time: climate anxiety, racial justice, women's rights, the impact of technology, sustainability, and, ultimately, the meaning of home. With her wry voice, sharp intelligence, and exuberant honesty, Orenstein shares her year-long journey as daughter, wife, mother, writer, and maker--and teaches us all something about creativity and connection.

"This is a beautiful book, full of ideas that could help restore America’s genius for freedom and promise.” — Thomas Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Care of the Soul A lifelong Emerson lover, teacher, and spiritual seeker reveals how American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s twelve essential teachings hold the answer to living an authentic and fulfilling life, one that is in har[Bokinfo]