"The current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America, Meacham shows us how what Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and others, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists...

"J. D. Vance's grandparents moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. However, Vance's family struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape...