McCullough is one of my favorite writers of history, and as an audio addict, I'm so glad this has finally been recorded. I confess McCullough is not my favorite narrator; Edward Herrmann did such a masterful job with McCullough's books, but with Herrmann gone, I'm willing to settle for the author. Listening to him read these essays on famous (and sometimes not so) people in history is like sitting down with a favorite professor and listening to him share his best stories. Companionable, thoughtful, inspirational. What I like best about McCullough is the way he integrates people, landscapes, events, and ideas to tell such accessible stories. He creates a true sense of time and place, you-are-there, I guess. He even talks about how he found his profession. For fans of Simon Winchester, who also reads his own books (The Men Who United the States is an especially good match thematically), and John McPhee, who is another master of profiling personalities to add another dimension to discussions of events and ideas.

9/2019 The description of this book is misleading. It is not a cohesive book. It is a collection of articles by David McCullough. Some are wonderful and deal with little known brave people in history; some are boring and have little to do with bravery or people at all. I enjoyed the one about Harriet B. Stowe and the one about Louis Agassiz.

This book is a compilation of articles that David McCullough has written over the years, consisting of mini-biographies and historical scenes. McCullough has a wonderful way of bringing history to life. As I usually expect in a collection of essays, some are more compelling than others. I particularly enjoyed the articles on Alexander von Humboldt, Louis “look at your fish” Agassiz, artist Frederic Remington, the construction of the Panama Railroad in the 1850s, and highlights of his visits to Washington DC. There is also an article written for Life Magazine’s 50th anniversary that distills the history of the US since 1936. I found it interesting that we are still learning the lessons McCullough recounts at the end of the book, which was published in 1991. I listened to the audio book, competently read by the author in his gravelly baritone.

I guess I’m having a moment with non-fiction. It seems to be what I’m enjoying reading most for the time being.

This was my first David McCullough book. Technically, it’s a collection of essays, written about a variety of different people and places and things. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author.

I was moved by so many of these essays. I want my kids to read them. I want my friends to read them. I want to find a hard copy and go highlight dozens of passages and then copy them down into my journal and mull them over and understand them on a deep level. Not necessarily to agree or disagree with any particular ideology or event, but to know the why of how things are. The interconnected-ness of everything is fascinating to me.

This essay collection was the perfect combination of depth and breadth for a busy mama to keep my distracted brain engaged without loosing the thread by being too detailed and deep to follow.

Highly recommend.

In McCullough's introduction he explains that to him history is not just what someone has accomplished, it is also how they lived, the things that made them come alive as he certainly does in this book. He takes little known characters, or characters we do know but may not know these particular facts and he brings them alive for the reader.

Humboldt, whose journey was overshadowed by Lewis and Clark's but rivaled their in his contributions to the study of glaciers and ice floes, skeletons and so many others of the natural sciences. Agassiz, who started the first museum of Zoology and whose wife, after his death, became a founder of Radcliffe College and was their first president.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was extremely poor until she started writing and than spent more than she earned by buying into various ventures with the hope of improving someones lot in life.

Teddy Roosevelt, who fell in love with the Badlands, the start of his natural park and though many found his fascination with the Wild West a little tiresome to the point that when William McKinley died, "Mark Hanna is said to have exclaimed , Now Look! That damn cowboy is president."

So much more, the painter Remington, the men who built the Panama Bridge, who death toll would only be rivaled years later when the Panama canal was built. The builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, whose architects had an average age of only 31.

So much more and all so interesting. Little tidbits about their marriages, their personal lives, their children and the times in history they were alive.

Conrad Richter, who was a personal friend of his is also poignantly portrayed and now I want to read a copy of his novel, "Lady", which is McCullough's favorite.

He makes history accessible, he brings it alive.

This book is a collection of short, biographical essays, ranging from Alexander von Humboldt to David Plowden, with many fascinating characters in between. The subjects were fascinating. I love David McCullough. But I didn't enjoy this book. Sure, it was great to get a glimpse into the lives and accomplishments of the book's subjects. However, the necessarily shallow treatments of these subjects (each essay was about 15 pages) made me feel like I was sitting down with Wikipedia and other Web sources over a quick lunch break at work, getting a few nuggets about some historical person or event that I had heard of, but didn't know much about. That's valuable, to be sure, and having the information come from McCullough certainly adds a level of confidence lacking from free-form Googling.

The trouble is, that's not the subject treatment I want when I turn to a McCullough book, right? The Johnstown Flood, Mornings on Horseback, The Great Bridge... these are books that delved into great detail on their subjects, making me feel like a witness to events from long ago, and an actual acquaintance of people I could never meet. These digest essays felt rushed at times, and cursory throughout, which left me feeling like I'd gone to an expensive steak house and been served a McDonald's hamburger patty on a paper plate.

Had I eschewed this book, I suppose, I would have had to content myself with remaining ignorant on the lives of its many characters. Given my reading volume, am I really ever going to get around to a full-length biography of Humboldt? Or Remington? Probably not. But then again, perhaps I'd be more satisfied knowing a lot about ONE of the people in this collection, rather than a little bit about all of them.

This book is a must-read for history fans and covers a wide variety of subjects; from the Panama Canal to Washington, D.C., from Humboldt to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Each chapter is a historical vignette covering a different subject. A great read for the train or bus commuter.

Originally published as magazine articles, the vignettes in this book are of mixed quality. Some of them are as good as anything McCullough has written, which is very good indeed. Others not quite up to that high standard.

I am working my way through all of McCullough's books. I have loved most of them. However, this book is probably my least favorite of all of them I have read so far. It is a collection of essays (with a couple of talks/speeches thrown in). I wish I could rate them individually, because some of them were far better than others; some I would have given 5 stars and at least one would have only gotten 2. Overall, it was pretty good, but not one I would seriously recommend unless you are simply planning to read all of his books.

“It is a shame that history is ever made dry and tedious, or offered as a chronicle almost exclusively of politics, war, and social issues, when, of course, it is the full sweep of human experience: politics, war, and social issues to be sure, but also music, science, religion, medicine, the way things are made, new ideas, high attainments in every field, money, the weather, love, loss, endless ambiguities and paradoxes and small towns you never heard of. History is a spacious realm. There should be no walls.

What history is chiefly about is life, and while there are indeed great, often unfathomable forces in history before which even the most exceptional of individuals seem insignificant, the wonder is how often events turn on a single personality, or the quality called character.” - David McCullough, Brave Companions

Okay, confession time: this is the fist McCullough I've read. His books have been recommended to me dozens of times (especially John Adams), but I have always had this aversion to "popular" historians. There are certain popular historians that I just distrust--they have published too much to have done much of the work themselves--or to really dive into the material.
McCullough does not appear to be one of those "popular" historians.
This book is a collection of essays, first published in 1991. The majority of the essays are brief, biographical sketches of some fascinating people--some of whom I had never heard of, many of whom don't follow into my usual categories of historical interest. But each essay was wonderful. He introduced me to some people I would love to know more about, such as Miriam Rothschild. He told the jaw-dropping story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the railroad line across Panama (before the canal).
I loved his writing style--he doesn't get bogged down in details like so many historians, but somehow senses exactly what we the reader need to know in order to understand.
Highly recommended. I may even tackle John Adams one of these days.

J only gave this book 4 stars because to me, there were a couple of uninteresting chapters. Otherwise it was rather good, focusing on people, places, and events.