David McCullough is my favorite author of books on history. I have been deeply engrossed by his accounts of the digging of the Panama Canal in
The Path Between the Seas and his presidential biographies of
Truman and
John Adams (on which the John Adams mini-series was based). His retelling of the personal, financial, social and engineering obstacles that had to be overcome in order to build the
The Great Bridge to Brooklyn was intensely interesting to me.
In a speech publicized by Public Radio on the program Word for Word, which can be found
here, Mr. McCollough made the following two motivating statements:
"Trying to plan for the future without having a knowledge of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers."
"The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know."
Anyone want to form a History Lover's Club?
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