What to Read Next: Essential American Stories

#318, featuring "American Prometheus"

Happy Friday, readers!

March is here! It feels like spring is just around the corner once we hit the year’s third month. The air starts warming, pops of green begin sprouting, and the cold days of winter slowly become fewer. I’m here for it.

Today’s newsletter highlights two Pulitzer-winning non-fiction titles that felt like essential American stories. They are at the core of who we are as a people and as a powerful nation on the world stage.

Let’s jump right in.

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American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin

Published: 2005 | Pages: 592

This highly acclaimed biography from 2005 has been back on the bestseller list since its movie adaptation, Oppenhemier, was released last summer. I finally took the plunge, in audio form, and immediately understood why it’s captivated readers for the last twenty years.

American Prometheus is roughly split into thirds: his life and career until the Bomb, the Bomb, and the aftermath of the Bomb. Interestingly, the Bomb itself doesn’t get discussed in great detail, but its impact reverberates through the entire narrative.

I found Oppenheimer to be an utterly fascinating character. He was as much a philosopher as a scientist; he spent a lot of energy thinking about the role and meaning of physics, as well as its impact on the world. Interestingly, it seems like Oppy — as nearly everyone called him — wasn’t necessarily brilliant on a pure science level, but was brilliant on an organizational level. He could synthesize various ideas and put them together into a coherent project. (That was how I read it, at least.)

Of course, this was never more evident than in marshaling the greatest minds of the era toward perhaps the most consequential scientific project in human history. Rather than getting deep into the physics of the Bomb, Bird and Sherwin skirt around that as much as possible and instead give us the human story of how it came to be — the big personalities, the politics, the military implications, etc.

After the Bomb, the authors go into great detail about Oppy’s ostracization because of his earlier ties to the Communist Party (which were certainly present, but not alarming). It was the Red Scare at its worst.

Over the course of almost 600 pages (which translated to about 30 hours of audio), the authors never lost my attention, which is saying something. If you’re a reader of history and biography, this is a book that needs to be high on your list.

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Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie

Published: 2022 | Pages: 415

This unique exploration of race and freedom won the Pulitzer for history just last year and offers one of the more memorable narrative structures I’ve come across.

Profiling a single county in Alabama over the course of America’s history, Cowie dives deeply into analyzing how the fight for “freedom” usually means one group of people trampling all over the civic and human rights of other groups.

Barbour County has been uniquely positioned at the forefront of a number of American crises, from the Native American wars of the early 19th century, to Reconstruction after the Civil War, to the civil rights battles of the 1960s. Being the home county of the infamous segregationist politician George Wallace is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the explosive story of this particular place.

In the midst of narrowing in on Barbour County’s specific history, Cowie then traces an ideological timeline of what “freedom” really means: Who is it for? How is it attained? How is it enforced? How has the idea evolved over America’s ~250 years of existence?

I also listened to this one (more and more of my non-fiction consumption these days is via audio) and really enjoyed Andre Chapoy’s emotive narration. Freedom’s Dominion is a thought-provoking read that really had me thinking about the idea of freedom in the American story. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in our country’s ideological history.

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Thanks so much for your time and attention. I deeply appreciate it.

-Jeremy