American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a HurricaneWhat are the roots of creativity? What makes for great leadership? How do influential people end up rippling the surface of history? In this collection of essays, the author reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success. They had qualities that were even more rare, such as imagination and true curiosity. He reflects on how he became a writer, the lessons he learned from various people he met, and the challenges he sees for journalism in the digital age. He also offers loving tributes to his hometown of New Orleans, which both before and after Hurricane Katrina offered many of the ingredients for a creative culture, and to the Louisiana novelist Walker Percy, who was an early mentor. He describes the joys of the "so-called writing life" and the way that tales about the lives of fascinating people can enlighten our own lives. |
Contents
My Socalled Writing Life | 1 |
The Opinions of Mankind | 34 |
McGeorge Bundy the Brightest | 49 |
Hes Back | 56 |
James Baker Wise Man? | 66 |
Colin Powell the Good Soldier | 77 |
We Meet Again | 85 |
Figuring Out Ronnie | 101 |
the Age OF technOlOgy | 163 |
The Passion of Andrew Grove | 190 |
Our Century and the Next One | 197 |
The Biotech Age | 205 |
Luces Values Then and Now | 227 |
A Bold Old Idea for Saving Journalism | 242 |
Woody Allens Heart Wants What It Wants | 251 |
How to Bring the Magic Back | 266 |
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