Authors: Evan Thomas, Richard Davidson
ISBN-13: 9781607882046, ISBN-10: 1607882043
Format: Compact Disc
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Date Published: April 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Evan Thomas is Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Wise Men(with Walter Isaacson); The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams, Ultimate Insider; and The Very Best Men -- Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two daughters.
On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in the Havana Harbor. Although there was no evidence that the Spanish were responsible, yellow newspapers such as William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal whipped Americans into frenzy by claiming that Spain's "secret infernal machine" had destroyed the battleship. Soon after, the blandly handsome and easily influenced President McKinley declared war, sending troops not only to Cuba but also to the Philippines, Spain's sprawling colony on the other side of the world.
As Evan Thomas reveals in his rip-roaring history of those times, the hunger for war had begun years earlier. Depressed by the "closing" of the Western frontier and embracing theories of social Darwinism, a group of warmongers that included a young Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge agitated loudly and incessantly that the United States exert its influence across the seas. These hawks would transform American foreign policy and, when Teddy ascended to the...
In his absorbing narrative of men who found duty or fulfillment or personal meaning in a war for empireand of other men, like William James, who feared that such a quest would rot the nation's soulThomas has illuminated, in a compulsively readable style, a critical moment in American history. This is a book that, with its style and panache, is hard to forget and hard to put down.