I’ve never been a serious history buff. But as my home page points out, “I have a passion for great writing.” Lately I’ve been exploring historical writers, looking for tastes of “the exquisite beauty of a powerful idea expressed in expertly-chosen words.”

As readers of this blog know, I loved David McCullough’s stuff: John Adams (lately of HBO fame) and 1776. I also devoured his Truman, an unexpectedly delicious treat: that Harry S. certainly exemplifies the uniquely piquant flavor-smack we think of as “American.”

I’ve also enjoyed the work of my Amherst neighbor, professor Joseph J. Ellis: his Founding Brothers was a bestseller sensation a few years ago, and his more recent American Creation is even better. What amazing perspective he brings to this country’s founding years and impulses! He brings these people—the pugnaciously brilliant Alexander Hamilton, exquisitely diplomatic James Madison, perplexingly self-contradictory Thomas Jefferson—alive and weaves a context that puts present-day politics in a whole new light.

And I went absolutely nuts over Erik Larsen’s stuff: The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac’s Storm: crime novel meets historical reconstruction, all well worth reading and frantically enjoyable: more fun than Arthur Conan Doyle or Ian Fleming!

But far and away my favorite historical writer, bar none, has turned out to be a guy named Tony Horwitz.

I’m right now reading A Voyage Long and Strange on my Kindle. It’s the story of the founding of America—the part we don’t know. The part that happened in the 100-plus years between the voyage of Columbus in 1492 and the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620.

This man has an absolutely giddy, hilarious mastery of the English language:

John Smith was the pivotal figure in the founding of English America, and the most vivid: a short bushy braggart, a con man, an escape artist, an accomplished klller. Smith saved Jamestown and set the Pilgrims on course for Plymouth. He demonstrated, in both word and deed, that the New World demanded a new type of man—one like him. Self-made, scornful of rank, and ceaseless in his salesmanship, Smith was apostle and exemplar of the American Dream.

If this sounds like hyperbole, it should: everything about Smith was overstated, usually by himself. He penned one of England’s first autobiographies, in the third person, starring Captain Smith as an early modern superhero, battling evildoers and impossible odds. England’s advances in American were all due to him: the discoveries of others, he wrote, “are but Pigs of my owne Sow.”

And there’s the rub, as a contemporary of Smith’s [i.e., Shakespeare—JDM] might have put it. The story of America’s English birth depends on a blowhard who is easy to dislike and even easier to doubt.

In researching this work, Horwitz himself criss-crossed the back woods of America, traveling in the European pioneers’ footsteps, from Vikings to Spaniards to French to English—and his recreation of early history is interlaced with his (variously hair-raising and sidesplitting) accounts of his own trek to experience these roots firsthand. Here’s a bit of his encounter with a putative descendant of Viking forbears in remote Newfoundland. In this scene, Tony is interviewing an old man named Job Anderson:

He mentioned that his gradnfather was Norwegian, and I asked if this had given him any sense of identity with the Vikings whose homes he’d helped unearth.

“Too far back,” Job replied. “I can’t tell you no lies. I never ran with them. I’m old, but not that old.” Then he broke into song: “Born here in the morning, quarter after two, with me hands in me pocket, and me old ragadoo.” When I looked at him blankly, he said, “A ragadoo’s a coat.”

Job patted his goat. “She’ll live till she dies, this one.” I nodded, bought a pair of socks, and retreated to my car, bewildered by my first contact with Newfoundlanders. Were they having fun with me? Or were they all barking mad?

Do you love this guy, or what?

My next book releases in four days.

Actually, calling it “my” book is a qualified statement: The Answer represents the work of John Assaraf (of “The Secret” fame) and his long-time business partner Murray Smith, and you won’t see my name anywhere on it (except in the “Acknowledgements” in the back of the book, and that mention is very nicely done indeed). Still, write it I did, and it was one of the most fascinating projects I’ve ever done.

To read the (quite brief) story of how I came to write this book for John and Murray, click here.

At Amazon.com, you can view a two-minute video clip of John and Murray talking about the book. You can’t tell from looking, but I’m sitting right there, watching them from off-screen while they make this film clip. It happened in John’s living room (in that same amazing “dream board” house that we write about in the book and he talks about on The Secret) when I was visiting California in February to start work on John’s next book, The Vision Board Book.

John and Murray are also offering some excellent pre-release special deals on the book that include coaching sessions, mastermind sessions, and other such—well worth checking out. (I’ve been to their weekend program: it’s first class, best I’ve ever seen.)

I’ve been resisting the temptation to post links to every last review and blog that mentions The Go-Giver, lest I try your Gentle Post-Reader’s patience. But this one is worth going to peek at, mainly because the rest of his blog is so gorgeous!

My old friend Gilles Arbour, who lives in a Mont Saint-Hilaire, a beautiful little town on the Richelieu River just east of Montreal. His blog is bilingual (French and English), but his photographs are in the universal language of stunning visual beauty.

This is a man who knows how to use a camera.

(And by the way, it really is “two thumbs” up: I believe his left thumb, while hidden behind the book, is also pointed upward.)

Yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor featured an op-ed piece by our friend Traci Fenton, entitled, “Even Big Companies Are Embracing a Democratic Style.”

Traci’s company, WorldBlu, publishes the WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces, which we wrote about in our interview with Traci last year in the July/August edition of Networking Times. As Traci points out, this year’s list included a Fortune 500 company for the first time. Traci’s piece appears in both the print and online edition of the Monitor, which reaches over 5 million people worldwide.

Click here to read the article and also listen to a seven-minute audio interview Traci did with the Monitor’s opinion page editor, Josh Burek.

A reader writes:

“I had a question for you: Aside from your own work, what books have you found to be the most thought-provoking and inspirational?”

In the realm of business, Seth Godin’s books always delight me and make me think. The One Minute Manager had a huge impact on me back in the 80s. (Interesting: The Go-Giver ended up being repped by the same agent who repped One Minute Manager, and published by the same house that published Seth’s last few books. Law of Attraction in action?)

I was quite moved and inspired by Eckart Tolle’s The Power of Now when it came out a few years back, and more recently by his A New Earth. Reading Buckminster Fuller influenced me profoundly as a teenager. More recently, I loved The Tipping Point and Blink. I loved Freakonomics.

There’ve been many business books that have intrigued me. (I think my coauthor Bob Burg has read every business/success book under the sun. That man reads and absorbs more books than anyone I know.) But the books that have had the greatest impact on me, and been the greatest inspiration, have been novels.

As a youngster (10), reading the Narnia books changed my life. I couldn’t have told you exactly how, at the time, but they inspired me perhaps more than any other books, ever.

East of Eden (Steinbeck). A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving). Stardust and Coraline (Gaiman). (I cried at the end of Stardust — the book, not the film.) American Pastoral (Roth). The great ones.

Though I’ve never been a big history buff, I recently read 1776 and John Adams, both by David McCullough, and was enormously inspired by both. Washington, Knox and the rest, and John and Abigail Adams — what amazing characters these people are! And what a gigantically talented storyteller is McCullough.

I seem to be most inspired and thought-provoked by great stories. Aren’t books miraculous things?

What are some of your favorites?

Tomorrow night, being Sunday, May 4, I’ll be a guest on the radio show “Amplify,” with host Father Ron Lengwin of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, for a two-hour live interview, from 9 to 11 p.m. [Update: the show’s format has been shortened to an hour and a half, from 9 to 10:30.]

(Hit that link, and then hit the blue “Listen Live” button at upper right.)

Man! A two-hour [that’s ninety-minute] live interview? This will be a first for me. Our topic: The Go-Giver.

Speaking of firsts, the station, Pittsburgh’s KDKA-AM 1020, has a fascinating claim to fame: with its Nov. 2, 1920 broadcast of election returns in the Harding-Cox presidential race, it became the very first radio station to broadcast anything. Ever.

(Interestingly, Warren Harding went on to serve as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, giving rise to what Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, terms “the Warren Harding Error,” named for the fact that he simply looked so “presidential” that everyone seemed to assume he’d make a great president. Harding insisted on writing his own speeches, which are generally considered to have been some of the awfullest ever heard. For example: “I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.” But I digress.)

The show (ours this Sunday, not Harding’s 88 years ago) will be heard in 38 states and half of Canada — but with the miracle of the Internet, you can hear it no matter where you are.

Writing of Warren Harding, the legendary critic H. L. Mencken said: “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

Tune in to see if I do better than Harding.

It’s amazing. I just read Neil Gaiman’s wonderful collection, M Is for Magic. But here is the amazing part: I made the decision to buy the book, sitting on a stool in my kitchen — and less than 60 seconds later, I held it in my hand and was guffawing my way through the first story, “The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds.”

A little later, I decided I might try out a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly. About 45 seconds later I held my first issue in my hands.

How is this possible? I’m reading them on my new Amazon Kindle.

On November 19, 2007, when Amazon introduced its new ebook reader, the thing sold out in less than six hours. I didn’t bother to order one; I was a skeptic. I like the way books feel in my hand, the smell, feel and turn of the paper. I didn’t see how an electronic device could replace that.

Which the Kindle doesn’t. Nothing will ever “replace” a paper-based book. But man, is the Kindle a genuinely great invention. Jeff Bezos got it right. As Neil Gaiman says (in his little Kindle-interview, which you can see here, along with more from Toni Morrison, Guy Kawasaki, Daniel Handler [aka Lemony Snicket] and others), “Like a book, it disappears in your hand, and you’re on the other side of the text, experiencing the world of the story.”

After reading what these authors had to say, I bought one—and fell in love.

Along with M Is for Magic and The Atlantic Monthly I have a few blogs, a few other journals, Kindle versions of The Go-Giver and You Call the Shots—and have room for about 200 more books. All instantly searchable, delightfully readable, entirely portable.

The Kindle is a breakthrough—not for tekkies, for book lovers.