Dust Jacket in Very Good condition. Some pages uncut.

The Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana

Business & Money

MEE, JR. CHARLES L.

Economics

Simon&Schuster

Rembrandt's Portrait: A Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Until now he has remained a mystery, leaving only a few sentences, the letters of his bankruptcy, a mistress’s notarized complaint - and the most glorious, compassionate paintings ever to astonish the eye. The first pure biography of this enigmatic legend is a fascinating detective story in which, clue by clue, the man himself emerges. Charles Mee, historian and playwright, renders a finely textured portrait of the artist against a richly described background of seventeenth-century life. He captures the human Rembrandt, the ordinary man and unexpected genius. We see the youthful, arrogant poseur, son of a small-town miller, seeking a life of art amid the cosmopolitan bustle of Amsterdam. We see the outsider struggling to rise without patron or court commissions, failing as an entrepreneur while immortalizing simple people in works of haunting complexity. We see the inspired moments behind masterworks like The Anatomy Lesson and Nightwatch and all the conflicting guises of their creator - bohemian and aspiring bourgeois, husband and lover, honored genius, penurious vagabond, and finally, the essential dichotomy - the egocentric master who, despite his intense self-absorption, captured the diversity of humanity with extraordinary empathy, sensitivity, and grace.

Rembrandt: A Life

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Genius of the People is a timely account of the birth of America’s national government during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Charles L. Mee Jr. vividly describes the personalities, issues, conflicts, compromises, and implications of an epoch-making meeting of brilliant and not-so-brilliant political leaders, whose vision and shortsightedness still direct our lives today.

Genius of the People: The Making of the Constitution

History

Americas

For two weeks in the summer of 1945, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Josef Stalin gathered to reconstruct the world out of the ruins of World War II. They met “only a few miles,” as President Truman noted, “from the war-shattered seat of Nazi power” – around a baize-covered table in the Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. The Allied powers had met twice before, engaging in the cordial horse-trading of properties and promises, to perpetuate a united military front against Germany. Potsdam, however, was different. With Germany defeated, the Allies knew victory in the Far East was imminent. The objective was no longer how to unite for victory, but how instead to divide the spoils and create a new balance of power. In The Deal, Charles L. Mee Jr. demonstrates how, with national self-interest the primary motivation, peace was destined to be sacrificed to deliberate discord. If Allied harmony would stand in the way of expanding “spheres of influence,” then it would become necessary to maintain the political expedient of aggression. What did each power want and were these objectives of sufficient importance to warrant forfeiting peace? Would the outcome have been different had Churchill’s rhetoric been less powerfully disruptive, had Stalin been surer of domestic calm, had Truman been more open? Would the history of the last seventy years have been the same? Through logbooks, eyewitness accounts, and conference transcripts, Mee vividly reconstructs this moment in history, when three men came together to forge a peace and a new face for Western Europe and left with a tri-partite declaration of the Cold War.

The Deal: Churchill, Truman, and Stalin Remake the World

Military

The imperial powers of the nineteenth century, having weakened one another in World War I, destroyed themselves in World War II. In the aftermath of the war, Europe was in shambles. Nearly all of France, Germany, Italy, and Poland had been devastated. Bridges and roads were gone. Rivers and canals were clogged with sunken ships and fallen bridges. Unexploded bombs and shells littered fields. Postwar inflation whipsawed the survivors: cigarettes, coffee, and chocolate were better currencies than Deutsche marks. Prices rose in Italy to thirty-five times their prewar level. Before the year was over, disastrous harvests across the continent would leave Europeans hungry, and, in some places, even starving. Only two great powers remained strong enough to consider taking over, or materially influencing, Europe - the United States and the Soviet Union. United States Secretary of State George C. Marshall had a plan. Here’s the story of that plan and the fascinating man who put it together.

Saving a Continent: The Untold Story of the Marshall Plan

When Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, he brought to Washington some of his political chums from Ohio. They played poker; they sold illegal liquor permits, pardons and paroles. They sold fixes in the Justice Department and transported contraband across state lines. They sold naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome and sheets out of Army warehouses. The Ohio Gang, an historical entertainment peopled with the characters of the day, follows Harding and his cronies from their Ohio childhoods to the smoke-filled rooms of the Republican convention and on to the White House. We meet Henry Daugherty, the attorney general with the disconcerting eyes; Jess Smith, tall and pigeon-toed; Nan Britton, the teenage girl who fell in love with Harding’s campaign posters and who later became his mistress and mother to his illegitimate daughter; and America’s first lady, the Duchess. Following the antics of the president and his administration, The Ohio Gang concludes with Harding’s whistle-stop tour of the country—his final, despairing attempt to keep his presidency from coming undone. An entertaining and immensely readable encapsulation of democracy American-style, The Ohio Gang is an historical tour de force in which the presidency is seen as a traveling medicine show.

The Ohio Gang: The World of Warren G. Harding

Historical

M.Evans & Company

A visit to Haldeman and other states of mind

In a literary tour de force, Charles L. Mee Jr. interweaves images and impressions from his life with political reflections inspired by a meeting with former Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman. The meeting—to discuss the possibility of collaborating with Haldeman on a book about his White House experience—becomes the vehicle for Mee’s probing of his own political perceptions. Here, exposed to the scrutiny of an unsparing journalistic eye, are the deep feelings of loss and failure that the Nixon debacle engendered in those Americans who came of age during Kennedy’s “Camelot” and marched to the anti-Vietnam anthems of the Johnson era. Mee writes with moving authenticity of his Midwest-Catholic boyhood and family roots reaching back to the Plymouth settlement; he vividly recounts the physical and psychological pain of a near-fatal battle with polio at age fourteen and his intellectual awakening during convalescence But the most pivotal reminiscences are of his student years at Harvard and his experiences aas an editor/writer/activist in the 1960s. There is wonderment and bewilderment in Mee’s telling of this time. Along with others of his generation, he asks: “What happened? Who were the real betrayers of the dream?”

A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind

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