American Greats - Hardcover

American Greats is a big, beautiful book, and the timing of its release is impeccable: if ever there was a book to celebrate the end of the millennium, this is it. How can you not love a book that features essayists like David McCullough writing about the Brooklyn Bridge, John Updike on The New Yorker, Christopher Buckley on the Coca-Cola recipe, Gay Talese on The New York Times, and David Halberstam on West Point? Editors Robert A. Wilson and Stanley Marcus seek to celebrate American spirit and ingenuity in words and pictures--and do it wonderfully. The 80-plus people, events, and items chosen for inclusion may seem quirky, but American Greats doesn't claim to be definitive. The choices they make, though, are inarguable. Here's a sample: C-SPAN, the Corvette, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, the G.I. bill, the Gettysburg Address, Iditarod dogsled racing, the final episode of M*A*S*H, the Marshall Plan, National Geographic maps, the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, the pony express, the skyscraper, Sesame Street, the Smithsonian Institution, Tabasco sauce, ticker-tape parades, the women's suffrage movement, the Wright Brothers, and Yellowstone National Park. --Linda Killian

Robert A. Wilson has more than twenty-five years of experience in advertising, public relations, graphic design, and film production. He is the author of Character Above All. Stanley Marcus is the chairman emeritus of Neiman-Marcus and recognized as a merchandising innovator who brought the excitement of show business to the specialty store he headed from 1950-1976.