Jeff
Jeff VanDam, First Husband of Roscoebooks and Special Occasions Employee
Jeff VanDam is a lawyer and ex-journalist who moonlights as a volunteer book reviewer and stockroom attendant at RoscoeBooks. When it comes to reading, he alternates between sweeping historical nonfiction about grand lives and modernish sardonic novels. To be more specific, he enjoys Caro, O'Neill, Kearns Goodwin, Chabon, H.S. Thompson, Shteyngart, and anything written about Theodore Roosevelt. His favorite book remains To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. He did not like The Goldfinch. He is also the parent, along with this store's owner, of a one-year-old who greatly prefers the works of Eric Carle and Graeme Base to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship.
“Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which [Adam] Johnson is painting here.”—The Washington Post
A searing, beautiful, and deeply comic novel by a young American master
Referring to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, H. L. Mencken noted that his discovery of this classic American novel was the most stupendous event of my whole life; Ernest Hemingway declared that all modern American literature stems from this one book, while T. S.
Chabon's extraordinary story of one turbulent weekend in the life of a struggling writer, a satire of the permanent adolescence of the creative class
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING
Everywhere acknowledged as a modern American classic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, The Power Broker is a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power, but the story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York in the twentieth century.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak.
This first volume of Shelby Foote's classic narrative of the Civil War opens with Jefferson Davis’s farewell to the United Senate and ends on the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Perryville, as the full, horrible scope of America’s great war becomes clear.
From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. "Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review)