FDR's SHADOW 

The story  of Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Louis Howe.

I started out focusing on Howe's influence on FDR and came to see that his relationship with ER was just as constructive -- and complex.

THE CASE OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

(Library Journal
Editor's Selection)

A. Lincoln was the only president who leapt from a workaday career directly to the Presidency. I wanted to know all about that phase of his life, when he was a lawyer/family man, on the cusp of the most momentous responsibilities ever undertaken by a single American.

THE SPIRIT OF INVENTION
commemorative book for the Smithsonian
Institution Lemelson Center

When I was invited to write about this topic, which is so integral to the American mindset, I wanted to get beyond bios of the usual Famous Inventors, and look at the methods of the art, especially those common to otherwise obscure inventors.

PARISH PRIEST: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism (New
York Times bestseller), co-authored with
Douglas Brinkley
I like to write about lesser-known people, aside from FDR and Thomas Jefferson, of course(!).  Father McGivney didn't work for fame; he was an energetic priest in New Haven at a difficult juncture for Catholics in America.

RACE OF THE CENTURY: The 1908 New York to Paris Automobile Race(nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in History)

I like people who do something.  I'd be nervous to follow the race route from New York across three continents in a big BMW in 2016!  And they did it only ten years after the first practical cars.

MAVERICKS, MIRACLES and MEDICINE

(Affiliated with A&E Channel documentary)

The book was independent of the television program (which was beautifully produced.), but both related personalities who affected medicine even down to the current day.  I chose to take a partial vacation from American history and included many remarkable Europeans, from the early Rennaissance to World War Two, as well as Yankees.

PACKARD:The Pride (Best Book,
Automotive Journalism Conference)

I believe that cars are sociologicl expressions, same as architecture.  The publisher allowed me to research the people who bought a couple of dozen Packard cars new and how a specific model reflected a certain life.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED BOOKS

ETHER DAY: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It (Best
Book, Anesthesia Foundation)

I read a sentence about the discovery of surgical anesthetics in a long "Annals of Medicine" article in a vintage copy of The New Yorker.  I started looking into it and found a prism of unintended cooperation between three men, who were behind the breakthrough.