The Room Where It Happened is a nonfiction memoir published in 2020 by American diplomat John Bolton. A New York Times best-seller, the book chronicles Bolton’s 17-month tenure as national security advisor under President Donald Trump. Between April 2018 and September 2019, Bolton was party to some of the most important events in Trump’s presidency, including two summits with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the US’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, and the 2019... Read The Room Where It Happened Summary

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The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a nonfiction book by Jill Lepore, published in 2014. It falls into the categories of history, comics, women’s studies, and biography, and won the American History Book Prize from the New York Historical Society. Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. This guide was written from the hardcover first edition.SummaryThe first section, called “Veritas,” includes nine... Read The Secret History of Wonder Woman Summary

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“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway that was first published in Cosmopolitan in 1936. It explores themes of power and dominance, courage and cowardice, and the nature of masculinity. The story details a hunting party and love triangle in which a husband, a wife, and their hired huntsman struggle for dominance and power over one another. This guide references the collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro... Read The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber Summary

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Published in 1983, The Sign of the Beaver is a historical adventure novel for middle grade readers written by Elizabeth George Speare. Based on a true story that took place in 1760s Colonial America, the book follows the adventures of a young English boy who, while living alone in the Maine wilderness, befriends a local Penobscot boy who teaches him how to survive. The experience changes his views of himself, his family and fellow colonists... Read The Sign of the Beaver Summary

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The Sisters Brothers is a 2011 novel by Canadian writer Patrick DeWitt. Set in 1851, it traces the journey of Charlie and Eli Sisters, two hired killers traveling from Oregon to San Francisco to find a man called Warm, who allegedly stole something from their boss, the Commodore. The darkly comic Western is in the picaresque genre, as the brothers’ episodic misadventures explore different communities populating the American West.The Sisters Brothers is divided into 64... Read The Sisters Brothers Summary

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The Slave Ship: A Human History is a 2007 book by Marcus Rediker that describes what happened aboard the ships carrying enslaved people from Africa to the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean. Rediker focuses his history on the slave ship itself as well as those onboard. The book won numerous awards, including the 2008 George Washington Book Prize and the 2008 Merle Curti Award. Critics praise it for shedding light on a little-explored facet of... Read The Slave Ship Summary

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The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels is a nonfiction book published in 2018 by American journalist, historian, and presidential biographer Jon Meacham. The book explores periods of US history during which the politics of fear battled against the politics of hope. The author largely threads his narrative around issues of racial justice and anti-immigrant nativism, from the Reconstruction era in the postbellum South, to the civil rights era of the mid-20th... Read The Soul of America Summary

Published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is an important contribution to African-American literature, American literature, and sociology. A collection of 14 essays, the work is Du Bois’s description of the state of the South and African Americans’ lives at the turn of the 20th century. This guide is based on the Amazon Classics Kindle book edition.In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois describes the psychological struggles of African Americans as... Read The Souls of Black Folk Summary

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The Strange Career of Jim Crow is a nonfiction book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian C. Vann Woodward about the origins and nature of segregation in the Southern United States. Originally published in 1955, the commemorative edition was published in 2002. The Strange Career of Jim Crow argues that racial segregation in the rigid and universal form that existed in 1954 did not appear with the end of slavery. In the time between Reconstruction and... Read The Strange Career of Jim Crow Summary

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“The Swimmer” is a short story by John Cheever that was originally published in The New Yorker in 1964. The story is told in third-person limited narration and utilizes elements of Surrealism. The narrative draws on the myth of Narcissus and alludes to Homer’s The Odyssey while exploring the dynamics of post–World War II American suburbia.Content Warning: The source material and this guide include references to alcohol addiction.“The Swimmer” opens on Neddy Merrill, an upper-middle-class... Read The Swimmer Summary