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Joseph J Ellis's Reading List

The historian and author, most recently, of “The Quartet” keeps Plato, Kant, Hume, Locke and Nietzsche on his shelves. “Just looking over at them reminds me that once upon a time I was a very serious young man.”

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By the Book: Joseph J Ellis (2015)

NYT By the Book column (2015-05-14).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Cover of The Sixth Extinction
The Sixth Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert · 2014 · Buy on Amazon
"Kolbert, for example, is trying to tell us that climate change is the defining issue of our time, a view that I share."
Cover of The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Buy on Amazon
"I think The Scarlet Letter is the great morality tale in American literature that defies all merely moralistic categories."
Cover of The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · Buy on Amazon
"With Gatsby it's all about style. I try to reread it every summer for rhythm and flow."
Cover of The American Political Tradition
The American Political Tradition
Richard Hofstadter · Buy on Amazon
"When I was starting out, three books drew me toward the study of American history: Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow; and Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom."
Cover of The Strange Career of Jim Crow
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
C. Vann Woodward · Buy on Amazon
"When I was starting out, three books drew me toward the study of American history: Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow; and Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom."
Cover of American Slavery, American Freedom
American Slavery, American Freedom
Edmund Morgan · 1975 · Buy on Amazon
"When I was starting out, three books drew me toward the study of American history: Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow; and Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom."
The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
Carl Becker · Buy on Amazon
"Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, because it's short and has a mischievous argument about secular utopias."
Cover of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Buy on Amazon
"A close second is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which my literary colleagues tend to dismiss but that generates arguments among students about slavery that are invariably surprising in their sophistication."
Cover of The Irony of American History
The Irony of American History
Reinhold Niebuhr · Buy on Amazon
"Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, which I think he's already read, but needs to reread in his retirement for historical perspective on his presidency."
Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey · Buy on Amazon
"Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, for its lacquered style and how to distill."

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