Table of Contents
Most Popular . . .
More . . .
Hotlists 2008
Crime Fiction - embedded
Booklists
Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.
Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .
Overbooked is the winner of the 2008 Louis Shores - Greenwood Publishing Award: to recognize excellence in book reviewing and other media for libraries. The award recipient is selected for significant achievement related to a reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions.
Booklists and Suggested Reading
1776 Stars
Page Modified: August 19, 2008
Fiction and nonfiction titles centered around the Revolutionary War period and the birth of the United States.
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.
Fiction
- Treason
Author: Nevin, David
Publisher: Forge $ 27.95 ISBN: 0312855125 Date: 2001
Kirkus
Booklist
From the bestselling author of Dream West : Three powerful men--James Madison, Aaron Burr, and General James Wilkinson--collide in a tale of treason that puts the future of the nation and its democracy at stake.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 9/21/01 -
Scandalmonger
Author: Safire, William
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 27 ISBN: 0684867192 Date: 2000
Library Journal
Exploding any notion that political sex scandal is a recent phenomenon, our press-hounded Founding Fathers star in an outrageous - and fact-based - novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. Safire demonstrates how media intrusiveness into private lives and politicians' manipulation of the press are as old as the Constitution in this entertaining and thought-provoking historical novel. - Rise to Rebellion
Author: Shaara, Jeff
Publisher: Ballantine $ 26.95 ISBN: 034542753x Date: 2001
PW
More than a powerful portrait of the people and purpose of the American Revolution, Rise to Rebellion is a fictionalized account of history's most pivotal events: The Boston Tea Party, the battle of Concord, and of Bunker Hill. The author of the bestselling Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure reveals with new immediacy how philosophers became fighters and how a scattered group of colonies became the United States of America.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 5/17/01 - The Glorious Cause
Author: Shaara, Jeff
Publisher: Ballantine $ 29.95 ISBN: 0345427564 Date: 2002
PW
New York Times bestselling author Shaara brilliantly portrayed the origins of the American Revolution in Rise to Rebellion--now he continues the amazing saga of how thirteen colonies became one nation.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 9.30.02
Nonfiction
- Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution
Author: Blumrosen, Alfred W.
Publisher: Sourcebooks $ 24.95 ISBN: 1402204000 Date: 2005
Booklist
This carefully documented, chilling history presents a radically different view of the profound role that slavery played in the founding of the republic, from the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution through the creation of the Constitution.
Updated 6.9.05 - First American: The Life and Time of Benjamin Franklin
by Brands, H.W.
Publisher: Doubleday $ 35 ISBN: 0385493282 Date: 2000
Kirkus
PW
This major biography of Benjamin Franklin presents previously unpublished letters to and by Franklin and includes recollections and anecdotes of Franklin's contemporaries.
- Alexander Hamilton
Author: Chernow, Ron
Publisher: Penguin $ 35 ISBN: 1594200092 Date: 2004
Kirkus LJ Booklist
From National Book Award winner Ron Chernow comes a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 6.9.05 - The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
Author: Collins, Paul
Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1582345023 Date: 2005
Kirkus
The author of Sixpence House travels the globe piecing together the missing body and soul of one of America's most enigmatic founding fathers: Thomas Paine.
Updated 7.25.05 - American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
Author: Ellis, Joseph J.
Publisher: Knopf $ 29.95 ISBN: 0679444904 Date: 1997
Booklist
A shrewd, spirited biography of our third president--one that abstains from both Jefferson worship and Jefferson bashing--American Sphinx shows readers the protean personality, the deep deviousness, the multiple voices that lent themselves so brilliantly to Jefferson's political career.
Updated 6.9.05 - Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Author: Ellis, Joseph J.
Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 0375405445 Date: 2000
Kirkus
From the author of American Sphinx, the award-winning biography of Thomas Jefferson, comes an illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic--John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.
Updated 6.9.05 - His Excellency: George Washington
Author: Ellis, Joseph J.
Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 1400040310 Date: 2004
PW Booklist
The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. With his careful attention to detail and his lyrical prose, Ellis has set a new standard for biography.
Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, Joseph Ellis paints a full portrait of George Washington’s life and career–from his military years through his two terms as president. Ellis illuminates the difficulties the first executive confronted as he worked to keep the emerging country united in the face of adversarial factions. He richly details Washington’s private life and illustrates the ways in which it influenced his public persona. Through Ellis’s artful narration, we look inside Washington’s marriage and his subsequent entrance into the upper echelons of Virginia’s plantation society. We come to understand that it was by managing his own large debts to British merchants that he experienced firsthand the imperiousness of the British Empire. And we watch the evolution of his attitude toward slavery, which led to his emancipating his own slaves in his will. Throughout, Ellis peels back the layers of myth and uncovers for us Washington in the context of eighteenth-century America, allowing us to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments and the character of his spirit and mind.
When Washington died in 1799, Ellis tells us, he was eulogized as “first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Since then, however, his image has been chisled onto Mount Rushmore and printed on the dollar bill. He is on our landscape and in our wallets but not, Ellis argues, in our hearts. Ellis strips away the ivy and legend that have grown up over the Washington statue and recovers the flesh-and-blood man in all his passionate and fully human prowess.
In the pantheon of our republic’s founders, there were many outstanding individuals. And yet each of them–Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison– acknowledged Washington to be his superior, the only indispensable figure, the one and only “His Excellency.” Both physically and politically, Washington towered over his peers for reasons this book elucidates. His Excellency is a full, glorious, and multifaceted portrait of the man behind our country’s genesis, sure to become the authoritative biography of George Washington for many decades. - Publisher Marketing.
Updated 9.22.04 - Washington's Crossing
Author: Fischer, David Hackett
Publisher: Oxford $ 35 ISBN: 0195170342 Date: 2004
Booklist Kirkus PW
In a dramatic and colorful narrative of a pivotal moment in American history, we see how the campaign developed in a web of hard choices by many actors on both sides of the Delaware.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 2.5.04 - Washington's General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumpf of the American Revolution
Author: Golway, Terry
Publisher: Holt $ 26 ISBN: 0805070664 Date: 2005
LJ
Nathanael Greene is a Revolutionary War hero who has been lost to history. Golway examines how an overlooked Quaker from Rhode Island won the Revolutionary War's crucial southern campaign and helped to set up the final victory of American independence at Yorktown.
Updated 2.7.05 - John Adams: Party of One
Author: Grant, James
Publisher: FSG $ 30 ISBN: 0374113149 Date: 2005
PW
In this acute examination of a paradoxical U.S. president, Grant examines this complex and often contradictory founding father in the most well-rounded and multifaceted portrait of Adams to date.
Updated 6.6.05 - Landon Carter's Uneasy
Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation
Author: Isaac, Rhys
Publisher: Oxford $ 30 ISBN: 0195159268 Date: 2004
PW Kirkus
In this long-awaited work, Isaac mines the diary of a Revolutionary War-era Virginia planter--and many other sources--to reconstruct his interior world as it plunged into turmoil.
Updated 6.1.04 - Benjamin Franklin: A American Life
Author: Isaacson, Walter
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 30 ISBN: 0684807610 Date: 2003
PW
Rescuing Benjamin Franklin from the clich of genial codger, this book celebrates the most interesting, advanced, and earthy of the founding fathers.
Updated 6.6.05 - George Washington: The Founding Father
Author: Johnson, Paul
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 19.95 ISBN: 006075365x Date: 2005
Booklist
Washington is seen as one of the most important authors of the Constitution, in addition to his pivotal leadership of the Revolutionary War and a magisterial executive in the formative years of the new United States. He was a moderate man of few words, but when he spoke, he was worth hearing.
Updated 6.9.05 - Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
Author: Kaye, Harvey J.
Publisher: Hill & Wang $ 25 ISBN: 080908970x Date: 2005
PW
Showing how Paine turned Americans into radicals, the author presents the nation's democratic story with wit, subtlety, and, above all, passion. Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age.
Updated 6.6.05 - Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to
New York
Author: Ketchum, Richard M.
Publisher: Holt $ 30 ISBN: 08805061193 Date: 2002
Booklist
PW
Updated 9.23.02 - Gerneral George Washington: A Military Life
Author: Lengel, Edward G.
Publisher: Random $ 29.95 ISBN: 1400060818 Date: 2005
PW
Updated 6.6.05 - John Adams
by McCullough, David
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 35 ISBN: 0684813637 Date: 2001
Kirkus
Booklist
PW
In his first book since Truman, one of America's most distinguished and popular biographers breathes life into history with this compelling look at the second president of the United States, John Adams. More than just a biography, this book looks at the birth of a young republic and explores the extraordinary factors that transformed 13 colonies into a united nation.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - 1776
Author: McCullough, David
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 32 ISBN: 0743226712 Date: 2005
Booklist PW Kirkus LJ
Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Truman and John Adams, McCullough returns with the story of the Revolutionary War--a book certain to be another landmark in the literature of American history.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 4.5.05 - Benjamin Franklin
Author: Morgan, Edmund S.
Publisher: Yale $ 24.95 ISBN: 0300095325 Date: 2002
Publishers Weekly
Chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and as a best book for 2002 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, and Publishers Weekly. A finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. The greatest statesman of his age, Benjamin Franklin was also a pioneering scientist, a successful author, the first American postmaster general, a printer, a bon vivant. In addition, he was a man of vast contradictions. This bestselling biography by one of our greatest historians offers a compact and provocative new portrait of America's most extraordinary patriot. - Publisher Marketing.
Updated 7.3.02 - The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the
American Revolution
Author: Schecter, Barnet
Publisher: Walker $ 24 ISBN: 0802713742 Date: 2002
Kirkus
The Battle for New York tells the story of how the city became the pivot on which the American Revolution turned. The struggle for control of New York was by far the largest military venture of the Revolutionary War, involving almost every significant participant on both sides.
Updated 7.3.02 - Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, And the Birth of America
Author: Schiff, Stacy
Publisher: Holt $ 30 ISBN: 0805066330 Date: 2005
Booklist PW
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career, an eight-year mission that stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing view of him during an unforgettable chapter of the Revolution.
Updated 3.16.05 - John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of
the American Navy
Author: Thomas, Evan
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26.95 ISBN: 0743205839 Date: 2003
Kirkus
The author of an acclaimed biography of Robert Kennedy turns to another larger-than-life subject--a "Founding Fighter" who combined the revolutionary zeal of John Adams with the naval daring of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey--John Paul Jones, naval hero of the American Revolution.
Updated 3.13.03 - Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire, 1776-1783
Author: Weintraub, Stanley
Publisher: Free $ 28 ISBN: 0743226879 Date: 2005
PW
This startling new history of the Revolutionary War, told for the first time from the perspective of both the colonists and the colonizers, demonstrates that for the Americans, it was a war of rebellion, for the British, it became their Vietnam.
Updated 6.6.05 - An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
Author: Wiencek, Henry
Publisher: FSG $ 30 ISBN: 0374175268 Date: 2003
PW
In this groundbreaking work, Wiencek explores George Washington's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman. Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now readers see him in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.
Updated 9.08.03 - Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of
Black Patriotism
by Wilkins, Roger
Publisher: Beacon $ 23 ISBN: 0807009563 Date: 2001
PW
A civil rights advocate and historian reconsiders life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as he looks at the lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others who forged a nation in which "all men are created equal" but whose property included African women, children, and men.
Hotlists
African American Fiction | Christian Fiction
2008 Excel Files: (download - print, sort, etc.)
Crime Fiction | Fiction | African American Fiction | Christian Fiction | Nonfiction Notables
Stars
Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec Crime Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec
Speculative Fiction Romance Historical Nonfiction | YA
Overbooked is a volunteer project undertaken by Ann Chambers Theis: Collection Management Administrator, Chesterfield County (VA) Public Library. 9501 Lori Rd. or P.O. Box 297, Chesterfield, VA, 23832. Phone: 804.748.1760.
Overbooked is not an official Chesterfield County Public Library service. Overbooked.org is a nonprofit web site hosted by CVCO - Central Virginia's Community Online. Overbooked.com is a nonprofit web site in experimental mode. Overbooked does not endorse any commercial providers (or their products and services) linked to from this web site.
Please join the conversation(s) at Overbookers - a rather quiet social space for the chronically overbooked.
Join the Overbooked List - A quiet list for readers to share recent reads, keep up to date with details about new books, discuss favorite authors/titles, etc.
Comments, suggestions, corrections: Ann Chambers Theis (AKA Ann/ACT):
overbooked1@verizon.net
or
ann@overbooked.com
I really appreciate all the e-mail I receive from avid readers and writers and regret that I am not able to respond to all correspondents. Special thanks to those folks who regularly help keep me on track...