Seizing Destiny by Richard Kluger

Seizing Destiny by Richard Kluger

Less than 100 years after its creation as a fragile republic, the United States more than quadrupled its size, making it the world's third largest nation. No other country or sovereign power had ever grown so big so fast or become so rich and so powerful.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Kluger chronicles this epic achievement in a compelling narrative, celebrating the energy, daring, and statecraft behind America's insatiable land hunger while exploring the moral lapses that accompanied it. Comprehensive and balanced, Seizing Destiny is a revelatory, often surprising reexamination of the nation's breathless expansion, dwelling on both great accomplishments and the American people's tendency to confuse opportunistic success with heaven-sent entitlement that came to be called manifest destiny.

Richard Kluger, a native of Paterson, N.J., and Princeton graduate, grew up in Manhattan, where he worked for The Wall Street Journal, the (pre-Murdoch) New York Post, and the New York Herald Tribune, on which he served as the last literary editor. Entering book-publishing, he be-came executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of his own imprint, Charterhouse Books, before turning to writing books. Simple Justice, his acclaimed account of the Supreme Court's 1954 landmark Brown decision outlawing school segregation, and The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, both finalists for the National Book Award in history, were followed by Ashes to Ashes, an anatomy of the cigarette industry, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. His most recent book was Indelible Ink, about the birth of America's free press. Kluger is the author of six previous novels, among them Members of the Tribe and The Sheriff of Nottingham. He and his wife Phyllis have two sons and six grandsons and live near San Francisco.