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9781799944744

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Thomas Ricks's deeply personal, patriotic quest to recover and renew the principles that animated America's founders testifies eloquently to the value of historical understanding in these troubled times. Steeped in the classics, the founders could not have imagined our world and we are now, more than ever, acutely conscious of their failure to engage with the fundamental problem of racial slavery and its enduring legacies. But Ricks offers us a timely reminder of what the first four, nation-making presidents could imagine and did struggle to achieve. -- Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Professor of History, emeritus, University of Virginia, coauthor of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs Ricks knows his subject well, and, equally important, he writes about it lucidly. -- Gordon Wood, professor at Brown University and author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book. On every page I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in our country. -- James Mattis, general, US Marines (ret.) and 26th Secretary of Defense A fascinating and erudite look at how Greek and Roman writers influenced members of the Founding Generation...[who] looked to the classical world to answer critical questions about the nature of power and the nature of government. -- Annette Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and Pulitzer Prize-winning author

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Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post from 2000 through 2008 and was on the staff of the Wall Street Journal for seventeen years before that. He reported on American military operations in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he is also the author of several books, including The Generals, The Gamble, Churchill & Orwell, and the number-one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote First Principles while a visiting fellow in history at Bowdoin College. James Lurie, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, has worked for the biggest companies in the news, entertainment, and advertising businesses. He has an eclectic background; he has been a musician, a writer, and a doctoral candidate in Chinese history. He has been an audiobook narrator and even been the voice of a talking gasoline pump. As an actor he has had recurring roles on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Law & Order, Picket Fences, and As the World Turns, to name but a few, and he won a Dramalogue Award in Los Angeles for his stage work.

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