A IS FOR AMERICAN(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation of
citizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds?
These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as they sought ways to bind the newly United
States together.
　　In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Lepore
portrays seven men who turned to language to help shape a new
nation’s character and boundaries. From Noah Webster’s attempts to
standardize American spelling, to Alexander Graham Bell’s use of
“Visible Speech” to help teach the deaf to talk, to Sequoyah’s
development of a Cherokee syllabary as a means of preserving his
people’s independence, these stories form a compelling portrait of
a developing nation’s struggles. Lepore brilliantly explores the
personalities, work, and influence of these figures, seven men
driven by radically different aims and temperaments. Through these
superbly told stories, she chronicles the challenges faced by a
young country trying to unify its diverse people.

　　Jill Lepore is an associate professor of history at Boston
University. She is the author of The Name of War: King Philip’s
War and the Origins of American Identity, which won the
Bancroft Prize, Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Book Prize, and the New
England Historical Association’s Book Award.

　　?Engaging. . . . Deftly evokes a rich and colorful tradition,
the American as inventor, unifier, optimist and idealist.?
?Newsday
　　?Remarkable. . . . I read it at one sitting, mesmerized by the
scholarship, the erudition and the elegant simplicity of this story
of seven consummately noble American lives, each one of them, as
Jill Lepore reveals, a pilgrimage in the grand search for a
nation-creating linguistic ideal.? ?Simon Winchester, author of The
Professor and the Madman
　　?Wonderfully engrossing.? ?Boston Globe
　　?Lepore is a terrific storyteller, alert to trenchant details but
also able to convey the connections between events, the sweep of an
epoch.? ?The New York Times Book Review
　　?This is a book to ponder and re-leaf and return to.? ?Times
Literary Supplement
　　?A great read.? ?Chicago Tribune
　　?Eloquent. . . Smart and suggestive. . . Readers will enjoy an
intriguing journey filled with many small gems of understanding.?
?The New Republic
　　?Insightful and engaging. . . . Lepore?s handling of [these
men?s] distinctive careers gives them the place they deserve in the
national consciousness.??St. Louis Post-Dispatch
　　?Lepore?s fresh work is suggestive of new ways of imagining what
unites and divides us, what binds us to this earth.??Raleigh News
& Observer
　　?Entertaining. . . a charming book about the quirky origins of
some influential early American inventions.??The Washington
Times
　　?Lepore has . . . produced a work of cultural history that is
both diverting and informative.? ?Book — Revie