There's a new exclusive interview with David McCullough that give's an inside look into his thoughts on the Revolutionary War. Check it out here.

Here is the book run-down:

In 1776, David McCullough's bestselling account of a pivotal year in our nation's struggle, readers learned of the greatest defeats, providential fortune, and courageous triumphs of George Washington and his bedraggled army. Now, in 1776: The Illustrated Edition, the efforts of the Continental Army are made even more personal, as an excerpted version of the original book is paired with letters, maps, and seminal artwork. More than three dozen source documents -- including a personal letter George Washington penned to Martha about his commission, a note informing the mother of a Continental soldier that her son has been taken prisoner, and a petition signed by Loyalists pledging their allegiance to the King -- are re-created in uniquely designed envelopes throughout the book and secured with the congressional seal.

I have Seth Cohen (The O.C.) to thank for introducing me to Chuck Klosterman. I spotted him reading Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs during an episode of The O.C., and the title of the book intrigued me so much that I had to hunt it down. It was entirely fitting that a geek of Seth's stature should be reading the work of a self-proclaimed music and pop culture geek. Of course, I use the word geek in an affectionate way, given that I myself am not entirely without geekiness (I actually took some notes while reading this book).

Chuck Klosterman began his career as a journalist, writing mainly about music and popular culture. Killing Yourself To Live is his attempt to "understand why some rock stars don't start living until they die, why death equals credibility". Klosterman begins his journey at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, somewhat unsuccessfully. The hotel manager doesn't want him to talk about the hotel in his book, and insists that the room where Nancy Spungen died no longer exists. Undeterred, Klosterman picks up a rental car, stocks it with over 600 CDs for the trip, and sets off cross-country, taking in the site in Rhode Island where a fire killed over 100 Great White fans at a concert, the spot where Buddy Holly's plane came down, and a few others, culminating in a trip to Washington, where he visits Seattle and Aberdeen.

Klosterman is an entertaining narrator, and the book is peppered with soundbites, musings and tenuous analogies drawn between films and music. Not since High Fidelity (the film mind, not the book), have I enjoyed hearing someone describe music in such detail before. Klosterman describes, compares and critically evaluates the music he loves (rock music mainly), though it's a meandering journey and digressions abound, mainly on the subject of his old girlfriends. He discloses a lot of personal detail about his relationships, and what went wrong with them, and there's quite an analogy near the end of the book where each ex-girlfriend is compared to a member of KISS.

Near the beginning of the book, Klosterman states that "sexuality is 15% real and 85% illusion". Killing Yourself To Live is subtitled 85% Of A True Story. My powers of deduction are telling me that some of this book has been embellished somewhat, and at first I thought that this 15% illusion referred to in the subtitle was to be found in the discussion of his relationships, and the almost unlikely fabulousness of the women who loved him. Then I thought it may have been in the characters he meets on his travels. I'm still undecided. The actual site visits are often fleeting and unremarkable, but that could be the point - even with the knowledge that someone died there to give a location meaning, years after the event it's just a location after all. Popular culture is assigning significance to the sites, and I think that Klosterman gets this completely.

It could be argued that there is too much of the author in this book, but then maybe that's also the point. Klosterman is an avid consumer of music and films, and more importantly he is infectiously enthusiastic about his passions. I have Chuck Klosterman to thank for introducing me to the Dixie Chicks, following his discussion of their song There's Your Trouble in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. His writing has that effect on me. I'm off now to buy more Led Zeppelin albums.

The prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is spell-binding and delightful. This work won the Nobel for literature, I think in 1982. I am terribly proud to say that I bought my first copy in 1977, in the city of Salamanca, Spain. I was trying to learn Spanish, and a Panamanian guy told me to read that book and look up every word I did not understand. I think I have now read it 6 or 7 times. I still have my original copy, nearly 30 years old and well thumbed, and an Argentinian buddy of mine is reading it downstairs from where I am sitting right now.

The work of this outstanding Colombian author is now studied in universities across the globe, and his style is termed "magical realism". Why is it magical? Because it is highly original, imaginative, and unprecedented. Why is it realism? Because you find yourself believing the most improbable things as they are described in meticulous detail. For example, someone can go on a journey, and not be seen for several years, but then come home "one Thursay morning when it was raining heavily". (And you subconsciously think, - how did the narrator know it was Thursday, or what the weather was like, unless it is true?")

Initially, we are introduced to Col. Aureliano Buendia, and his thoughts as he faces the firing squad go back to a childhood memory, of the first time he saw ice (brought by a tribe of wandering gipsies), and thought it was a huge diamond. But then you see that he can not have died, because years later, he is remembering the moment of having that memory. Games with time, the labythrine thought process of a genius. Aureliano's parents, the larger-than-life Jose Arcadio Buendia, and his wise, practical and down-to-earth mother, Ursula, wander through the tropical jungles with a little group of friends and found a village miles from anywhere. This village will become Macondo, the scene for all the other actions to follow. Macondo in founded in a pristine age when "things were so new that some of them had not even been named yet".

A central character (among so many as to compare with the cast of War and Peace) is the gipsy, Melquiades. Melquiades is ancient, and "Death has been sniffing at the turn-ups of his trousers for years", but still his time has not come. He ends up living the last years of his life in the house of the Buendia family, where he secrets himself in a tiny study, and writes a manuscript in the little letters of an unknown alphabet, so they look "like clothes drying on a washing line". Long after the eventual deaths of the founders of Macondo, one of their descendants discovers that the script is Sanskrit, and devotes half a life-time to translating the parchments of Melquiades.

One of the most charming qualities of this book is that you can pick it up and allow it to fall open at any random page, read that one page only, and still enjoy it for the imagery, the sheer beauty with which everything is described and narrated.

There is a little secret to the style of this novel, which is that it has almost no examples of an adverb of qualification....(those words which in English would end with -ly). You would think that this would detract from the descriptiveness, but it doesn't. Instead, it makes the narration seem un-rehearsed and spontaneous.

I heard once that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was asked in an interview, how long it took him to write 100 years, and he said "all my life".

T.S. Eliot perceived culture like a river... the headwaters were the ancient Greeks, people like Homer, Hesiod, Sappho and everything that came later was flavoured by what had gone before. So Virgil was shaped by Homer, and Dante by Virgil and so on, up to the present time. In the 20th Century you can see the influence of Garcia Marquez in the works of the Chilean, Isabel Allende or the Spaniard, Ruiz Zafon. It would be hard to write anything (I think) after reading 100 years of solitude without leaving traces of the influence of that experience.

However wonderful the story may be, the reader is not really able to evaluate the whole work until right at the end. There is a surprise in store, which makes everything click into place, like those Chinese puzzle boxes with little sliding panels, so that you can not open them until you have moved all these tiny components in exactly the right sequence. Only then does the whole architecture of the work become apparent. You will put it down and go "wow" (or something similar.)

When I bought my first copy, it had an extra sticker on the cover that said, "inolvidable" (unforgettable). That was 30 years ago. I rest my case.

Life of a single man is not a God’s contrived automatic, but a discursive reality and an effervescent changing organism that reinvents itself over the course of time and space. A self-writing man therefore puts himself in the very heart of his own work, trying to examine this serpentine course of his existence, to explore his position in a three-dimensional space and reproduce his life through the surroundings. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first self-writing men who put his life under the close examination both of oneself and the potential readers, having made his Autobiography the first major secular work of the genre in the New World.

The book tells the Benjamin Franklin’s story of starting his career in printing, then through voracious reading becoming an educated author, inventor, scientist, statesman and diplomat. For me the book tells the story of a man who embodied American Dream, showing the readers the possibility of a rise from the lower middle class to the most influential caste on his own example. Though at first the Autobiography was dedicated to his son (“Imagining it maybe equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life…”), it was in the later chapters turned into an account of life and a self-help book for the posterity. But his tale of success is more than just a picture of his life in the eighteenth century America, but an attempt to present an idea of new American nation, and its concept of a model righteous citizen.

Through all 4 chapters of the book, the frantic pieces and sometimes irregular accounts of events, characters, failed and then successful ideas he evolves the concept of that conscious citizen that is vigilant, always ready to defend his principles, who is hard working, diligent and in the end always becomes a winner. With the aim of showing the reader an example of molding one’s own character into a righteous ideal, Franklin combines the text with the list of virtues and charts of a day organizer, which adds a first self-representational practice in American history. Among these virtues are frugality, order, resolution, industry, sincerity etc. This made the Autobiography a real source for gripping everyday ideas to change my daily routine, and bring some insightful clues to making myself more purposeful in pursuing my short-term goals.

It is a well-known fact, that the Autobiography is all about meddling faults: it was written in separate periods (from 1771 to 1788) and not in a single continuous stretch. But apart from Franklin’s forgetfulness about what was written in the previous chapters and his repetitive accounts of some events in his life (“Not having a copy here of what is already written, I know not whether an account is given of the means I used to …”), the story gives the reader a feeling of an author being in the constant evolution. His writing changes through the course of the book which indicates that Franklin becomes older, more sagacious, knowledgeable and prudent. Through the course of the story one gets an idea that people were instruments in shaping Benjamin’s character, so Franklin’s father, Josiah Franklin, bestowed upon his son a magical gift of being fair and preserving; his brother James was the one who made Franklin leave home and undergo extreme changes; Governor Keith was more than a bad man in a good story, he was a liar, and having encountered him Benjamin, forever impressed by false promises, would include the virtue of sincerity in all his works.

Reading Franklin’s Autobiography made me overwhelmed with the sense of a different reality, transformed my everyday surroundings into the time machine traveling hundreds of years to grasp the visions from the past, the performance of each actor, individual and collective object of the eighteenth century America. One of the means for the author to transform a reader’s reality in historical perspective is the language of that period, and the style which he applies to his narrative. Franklin’s prose is very rhetorical, he writes in a sense of a great fashion for that time, which at first gives an idea of his narrative as arrogant and condescending; to eliminate that sense the author switches to colloquial language from time to time to be closer to the ordinary man.

It’s sad, that Franklin never ended his story, never gave an account of an American Revolution, but that doesn’t prevent the book to be sold in millions of copies per year. The book still gives us a chance to gain a fuller essence of Franklin’s youthful weaknesses that he himself turned to strengths in his later years, he was among the first who tramped his predecessors as well as descendants with the first major account of a personal life as a source of learning wisdom by the follies of others.