100 books like Met His Every Goal? James K. Polk and the Legends of Manifest Destiny

Logic! While Machiavelli is looked upon as a shrewd politician he is quite the opposite of John Potenza, the character in my book, but that’s where the similarities begin. Machiavelli was the most logical person ever. I’m fascinated by Logic. So is my crime-solving detective, who uses everything logical to figure out life. Potenza is a loyal Italian, so is Machiavelli. Machiavelli is loyal to himself and his cause, for Potenza it's the cause and family.

If you love logic and intrigue, you will love The Prince. It deals with the logic of human experience; one powerful tool in our repertoire. It certainly was for the politician. The same for a surfing cop trying to keep two biker gangs from going to mattress. 

Forget the Alamo is a take-off on the popular saying at the time in Texas, “Remember the Alamo,” which was a battle cry. I love this book because of the logic the authors use and the tremendous hard-core research of letters and documents, to show why one of America’s legendary tales was a lot more myth. The true story of “why” more than the actual outcome continues to be battled today. John Wayne’s version, which many of us grew up with, was so far from the truth, it boggles the mind. The documentation in this book and the logic behind the letters that were written reveal the sad truth of what happened and more importantly what led up to the tragic end for so many brave souls.

Card Sharks is the story of the trading card industry and how one company, Upper Deck, created an industry of sports collectibles and then, because of greed, cheated its customers. Pete Williams's investigative book searched out true stories and documents and flipped the booming trading card world on its head. We all should have known the logic behind creating collectibles that cannot be sustained and how one company took the industry to new heights, fooled everyone, and then reworked itself to continue years later, even getting caught counterfeiting another company’s collectibles and pretty much getting away with it. It is a path I wrote about happening when it was happening, and few listened because there was money to be made. 

It truly is a diary, and it rests in the local county museum in rural Pennsylvania. Being a Pennsylvanian myself, I was fascinated to read this Civil War account of a foot soldier who came back alive and lived to a ripe old age as a local businessman. Bull’s story really does read like a movie script and I plan at some point to do exactly that with it. The story of courage and the logic he uses to get through each day as a soldier, wanting nothing more than to do his duty and to return home.

The epic, multi-volume work of one of America's great mid-century historians. An old-fashioned work of immense erudition, vivid narrative, decisive judgment. Never before or since have so many great and consequential speeches been delivered in Congress; Nevins furnishes every one of them with suitable embellishment. Vols. 2-4 (in the 8-volume version) offer wonderful set pieces on the great events of the time--the Kansas-Nebraska debate, the Dred Scott case, the rise and election of Abraham Lincoln.

I found Brown’s book extremely helpful in writing my own book on filibustering, because it spins out its story chronologically, starting with plots against Venezuela and Spanish territory on the U.S.’s southwestern frontier in 1806 (the latter headed by the infamous Aaron Burr) and winding up with the execution of William Walker by a Honduran firing squad in 1860, shortly before the American Civil War. There would be later filibuster expeditions to Mexico, Canada, Cuba, and other places, but Brown’s narrative provides a perfect starting point for anyone wanting an overall panorama of filibustering during its “golden age,” when it most influenced the American public and was most closely linked to the American expansion philosophy of Manifest Destiny. Brown enriches his book with ample photographs, maps, and a thirteen-page bibliography. 

Though he’s hardly a household name, William Walker, the most significant of the American filibusters, has been the subject of a surprising number of biographies. What is special about Michel Gobat’s book is his in-depth look at the actual government Walker set up to rule Nicaragua in the mid-1850s, the people he enlisted to run it, and his government’s ambitions and programs. Gobat suggests, importantly, that prior historians have underestimated Walker’s popular support in Nicaragua and overstated his ties to White southerners’ plans to expand U.S. slavery. 

As a boy, I encountered Kit Carson via the Landmark Books, and I could not resist rediscovering him in juxtaposition with his friend but non-kindred spirit, John C. Frémont, who nearly became president in 1856. Although Roberts mercifully spares us from exposing Frémont’s Civil War blunders, his account of the disastrous 1848-49 expedition renders the “Pathfinder” in his grandiosity a less sympathetic figure than the laconic scout. As Roberts notes in his epilogue concerning the feats of his two flawed subjects, “pure heroes or villains do not exist outside the pages of bad literature.” He likens the evolution of Carson as “thoughtless killer of Apaches and Blackfeet” to “defender and champion of the Utes” to a similar reversal in the case of General George Crook.

Mixing Faulkner’s gothic language with McCarthy’s sense of history, Blake writes a story of two brothers torn apart by circumstance and their experiences in the Mexican-American War.  Blake captures that sense of aimless wandering that echoes Faulkner’s stories—the rootless characters meandering across the country, not only unsure of their destinations but maybe even indifferent to them. To me, one of the most profound twists in the book is that the brothers don’t seem to care which side of the war they participate in. They are itinerants whose purpose in the world is simply circumstantial; they are instruments of universal forces that they neither question nor understand. 

This remixing of the American legend of Johnny Appleseed with climate science, ecoterrorism, and elements of Roman mythology results in a very big book — literally. At almost 500 pages, there’s a lot of, well, everything. But at its organic core, this is a story about the preservation of our most basic and necessary elements. As the story moves further into the distant future, the fight to protect the scraps and slivers of non-robotic life becomes more focused as it does urgent. By the end, what emerges is the gnawing sense that perhaps the mythology we’ve constructed around technology as our salvation is inhibiting the mysterious yet ultimately more powerful magic of a natural world quite capable of re-propagating itself if only we humans could bring ourselves to stand aside.