From the acclaimed poet—a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning. Bicentennial summons the world of Chiasson’s seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration, but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he never knew and who died in 2009. In these poems, Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time’s conundrums. “All of history, even the Romans, / they happen later, tonight sleep tight,” he tells his sons at bedtime. “You’ll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight.” In the topsy-turvy world of Bicentennial, history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boys grow up to be men; men never forget what it is to be boys; and fatherhood is the best answer to fatherlessness.

This classic collection includes the title story, acclaimed as Asimov's single finest Robot tale, and now made into a Hollywood movie starring Robin Williams. Each of the eleven stories here sparkle with characteristic Asimov inventiveness and imagination.

Examines the impact of the 1976 bicentennial on the way Americans celebrate the nation's past

The Kent family faces internal clashes as the Civil War ignites—from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South. In the hellish years of the Civil War, the Kent family faces its greatest trials yet. Louis, the devious son of the late Amanda Kent, is in control of the dynasty—and of its seemingly inevitable collapse. His cousin Jephtha Kent, meanwhile, backs the abolitionist cause, while his sons remain devoted Southerners. As the country fractures around the Kents, John Jakes introduces characters that include some of the most famous Americans of this defining era. Spanning the full breadth of the Civil War—from the brutal frontlines in the South to the political tangle in Washington—The Titans chronicles two struggles for identity: the country’s and the Kents’. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.