(The first three photos are by Alexis Schaitkin the last one is by Melissa Belle Kessler. Thank you to all the event organizers and bookstore staff who made these events possible! And not least of all, thanks to every one who turned out for them! More to come! June 28: Politics and Prose, Washington, DC here, likely, I am lecturing Washingtonians on how to think effectively “outside the Beltway,” as I was duly informed every out-of-town writer on political topics does. The main point concerns the interrelation between what government does/can do and how citizens think about what government does/can do…. City of Ambition is a brilliant history of the New Deal and its role in the making of modern New York City. June 27: New Dominion Bookshop, Charlottesville, site of my futile effort to live up to Andrew Meade McGee’s phenomenally generous introduction.Īlso June 27: I attempted a very short distillation of some of the central points of my book in a piece for the Daily Beast. June 26: Road trip! Taken near Orange, Virginia, en route to CVille for a reading at New Dominion.

FDR, who once served on the Harvard Club of New York’s admissions committee, would have been proud. Very knowledgeable crowd here, too! Plus an excellent turnout. The audience at this event really knew their stuff! Lots of interesting perspectives from native/long-time New Yorkers. The Strand folks were playing WW2-vintage WNYC broadcasts as the crowd arrived. Williams RELEASE DATE: A thoroughgoing, sometimes plodding account of the first major federal bailout of New York, one met with happier tidings than the equivalent of that old headline reading, Ford to City: Drop Dead. June 13: At The Strand with the historian Kim Phillips-Fein. CITY OF AMBITION FDR, LAGUARDIA, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN NEW YORK by Mason B.

City of Ambition by Mason B. Williams