Hailed as a film masterpiece and landmark in historical storytelling, Ken Burn's epic documentary brings to life America's most destructive - and defining - conflict. With digitally enhanced images and 5.1 surround sound, here is the sage of celebrated generals and ordinary soldiers, a heroic and transcendent president and a country that had to divide itself in two in order to become one. Commemorative Edition includes Bonus Disc Special Features - From the Archive: Shelby Foote Interviews - Interview with Ken Burns - Additional interviews: George Will, Stanley Crouch, Shelby Foote, and Jay Unger &amp; Molly Mason Other Special Features - Commentary by Ken Burns - Biography Cards - Battlefield Maps - Civil War Challenges - 16-page collector's booklet featuring a selection of photos and battle details. This DVD features subtitles in English (SDH) Color : Yes Stereo : Yes Production Year : 2011 Length : 660 minutes on 6 Discs Subtitles : Yes Country Of Origin : United StatesThe companion volume to the PBS series is an extraordinary collection of photos, engravings and paintings, many published for the first time, conveying military and political events of the Civil War, accompanied by a pungent text that avoids sentimentality in depicting "the most horrible, necessary, intimate, acrimonious, mean-spirited, and heroic" war in our history. Typical illustrations include a photo of a pile of amputated feet, four pages of clinical portraits of maimed soldiers, photos of nurses at work in hospitals and rare studio portraits of slaves among some 500 illustrations which, in combination with the text, present a memorable record of the War Between the States. The book, assembled by Ward, author of A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt , and historians Ken and Ric Burns, also includes original essays by distinguished historians James M. McPherson and C. Vann Woodward among others, and an edifying interview with historian Shelby Foote.

The Civil War Commemorative Boxed Set (Book+6 DVD+Soundtrack)

Ken Burns

Publisher

The companion volume to the celebrated PBS television series, with a new preface to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary   With more than 500 illustrations: rare Civil War photographs—many never before published—as well as paintings, lithographs, and maps reproduced in full color    It was the greatest war in American history. It was waged in 10,000 places—from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it and more than 600,000 men died in it. Not only the immensity of the cataclysm but the new weapons, the new standards of generalship, and the new strategies of destruction—together with the birth of photography—were to make the Civil War an event present ever since in the American consciousness. Thousands of books have been written about it. Yet there has never been a history of the Civil War quite like this one.    A wealth of documentary illustrations and a narrative alive with original and energetic scholarship combine to present both the grand sweep of events and the minutest of human details. Here are the crucial events of the war: the firing of the first shots at Fort Sumter; the battles of Shiloh, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg; the siege of Vicksburg; Sherman’s dramatic march to the sea; the surrender at Appomattox. Here are the superb portraits of the key figures: Abraham Lincoln, claiming for the presidency almost autocratic power in order to preserve the Union; the austere Jefferson Davis, whose government disappeared almost before it could be formed; Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, seasoned generals of fierce brilliance and reckless determination. Here is the America in which the war was fought: The Civil War is not simply the story of great battles and great generals; it is also an elaborate portrait of the American people—individuals and families, northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, slaves and slaveowners, rich and poor, urban and rural—caught up in the turbulence of the times.    An additional resonance is provided by four essays, the work of prominent Civil War historians. Don E. Fehrenbacher discusses the causes of the war; Barbara J. Fields writes about emancipation; James M. McPherson looks at the politics of the 1864 election; C. Vann Woodward speculates on how the war has affected the American identity. And Shelby Foote talks to filmmaker Ken Burns about wartime life on the battlefield and at home.    A magnificent book. In its visual power, its meticulous research, its textual brilliance, and the humanity of its narrative, The Civil War will stand among the most illuminating and memorable portrayals of the American past. 

Civil War - Illustrated History - Book Club Edition

History

Ric Burns

geoffrey-c-ward-based-on-a-documentary-filmscript-by-geoffrey-c-ward-ric-burns-and-ken-burns-with-co

Americas

Alfred.A. Knopf

Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn “the best book we’ve ever had. There was nothing before. There’s been nothing as good since.” Critical opinion of this book hasn’t dimmed since Hemingway uttered these words; as author Russell Banks says in these pages, Twain “makes possible an American literature which would otherwise not have been possible.” He was the most famous American of his day, and remains in ours the most universally revered American writer. Here the master storytellers Geoffrey Ward, Ken Burns, and Dayton Duncan give us the first fully illustrated biography of Mark Twain, American literature’s touchstone, its funniest and most inventive figure. This book pulls together material from a variety of published and unpublished sources. It examines not merely his justly famous novels, stories, travelogues, and lectures, but also his diaries, letters, and 275 illustrations and photographs from throughout his life. The authors take us from Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, to his time as a riverboat worker—when he adopted the sobriquet “Mark Twain”—to his varied careers as a newspaperman, printer, and author. They follow him from the home he built in Hartford, Connecticut, to his peripatetic travels across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. We see Twain grieve over his favorite daughter’s death, and we see him writing and noticing everything. Twain believed that “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” This paradox fueled his hilarity and lay at the core of this irreverent yet profoundly serious author. With essays by Russell Banks, Jocelyn Chadwick, Ron Powers, and John Boyer, as well as an interview with actor and frequent Twain portrayer Hal Holbrook, this book provides a full and rich portrayal of the first figure of American letters.

Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Geoffrey C. Ward

Dayton Duncan

Arts & Literature

KNOPF

The companion volume to the PBS documentary film about the first—and perhaps most astonishing—automobile trip across the United States. In 1903 there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire nation and most people had never seen a “horseless buggy”—but that did not stop Horatio Nelson Jackson, a thirty-one-year-old Vermont doctor, who impulsively bet fifty dollars that he could drive his 20-horsepower automobile from San Francisco to New York City. Here—in Jackson’s own words and photographs—is a glorious account of that months-long, problem-beset, thrilling-to-the-rattled-bones trip with his mechanic, Sewall Crocker, and a bulldog named Bud. Jackson’s previously unpublished letters to his wife, brimming with optimism against all odds, describe in vivid detail every detour, every flat tire, every adventure good and bad. And his nearly one hundred photographs show a country still settled mainly in small towns, where life moved no faster than the horse-drawn carriage and where the arrival of Jackson’s open-air (roofless and windowless) Winton would cause delirious excitement. Jackson was possessed of a deep thirst for adventure, and his remarkable story chronicles the very beginning of the restless road trips that soon became a way of life in America. Horatio’s Drive is the first chapter in our nation’s great romance with the road. With 146 illustrations and 1 map

Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip

"We were patterned after the early church of the apostles. The Book of Acts speaks of the community that anyone could join. They brought their goods with them, to be shared by all, and each shared in everything that was provided. And so that is the basis of our union and our life in community." --Eldress Bertha Lindsay, from the foreword The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God includes exquisite photography by Ken Burns, Langdon Clay, and Jerome Liebling, along with archival photographs from the Shakers' own collections and a historical text by Amy Stechler Burns. The book provides a deeper understanding of the architecture, craft accomplishments, and lives of the Shakers.

The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God

Religion & Spirituality

Amy Stechler Burns

Christian Books & Bibles

Random House Value Publishing

Tells the story of the Black baseball teams that played throughout the country before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947

Shadow Ball: The History of the Negro Leagues (Baseball the American Epic)

Jim O'Connor

Children's Books

More than forty outstanding archival photographs, accompanied by a fast-paced, readable text, chronicle the history of the Negro Leagues and profile some of the finest players of the era. TV tie-in.

Shadow Ball : The History of the Negro Leagues (Baseball : the American Epic)

Geoffrey Ward

UK edition of book originally published in 1997.

Lewis Clark

Travel

Pimlico

The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945

The story has been told for generations that one summer day in 1839, in upstate New York, Abner Doubleday created a new set of rules for a new game which he called baseball. But the story simply isn t true. Then how did baseball begin? Who played the first real game? The first night game? Who invented the curveball? Why were players once reluctant to use gloves & masks? Why is the pitcher s mound precisely 60 feet 6 inches from home plate? How did baseball evolve from a leisurely pastime into a billion-dollar industry? You ll find the surprising answers to these & many others questions in this highly readable history of the great American game. Based on the PBS TV documentary by Ken Burns. More than 70 dramatic photos.

Who Invented The Game?: Baseball, The American Epic

Teen & Young Adult

Paul Robert Walker

Sports & Outdoors

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Books by Ken Burns