Jill Lepore is America's greatest living essayist. No one else can sway so gracefully between the personal and the political, the micro and the macro, while remaining so firmly grounded in common human experience. She is a historian who can evoke the mystery of time, a memorist who uses recollection to open passages into the nation's psyche, a brilliant writer whose luminous prose can evoke at once the body and the body politic. These wonderful essays form a stunning mosaic of contemporary America and an alternative annal of our times.–Fintan O'Toole, author of We Don't Know Ourselves