Perspective

Born in Pittsburgh, PA, and educated in English there and at Yale University, David McCullough becomes interested in history and jumps into the demanding discipline as an amateur. Now the much-acclaimed author of biographies (presidents John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman) and chronicles of great human undertakings (the Johnstown, PA, dam, Panama Canal, and Brooklyn Bridge), all intended to allow non-specialists to feel the times about which he writes, McCullough brings together in this volume seventeen portrait sketches, prepared over some twenty years and previously published in journals or delivered as speeches.

At first glance, the subjects are seemingly unrelated, but they are in fact interconnected by courage and decisiveness, which as a writer, McCullough finds inspiring. They are also connected by the serendipitous chain of research - reading about one person leads to another, which leads to yet another, and so on - which McCullough finds...