Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham comes to Spokane May 6

Ticket are now on sale for the Northwest Passages Book Club’s evening with Jon Meacham, the presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.”

The May 6 event, co-presented with Whitworth University, will be held at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox. Meacham will be in conversation with Whitworth President Beck A. Taylor.

Meacham’s latest book explores the current moment in American politics and life by looking back at previous times in the nation’s history when hope overcame division and fear. He decided to write the book in 2017 after watching the violent clashes at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“He wants to remind us that the current political turmoil is not unprecedented, that as a nation we have survived times worse than this,” writes Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz in a New York Times review. “And initially this sounds a little too reassuring. But Meacham quickly adds that America’s survival has never been automatic.”

Wilentz called Meacham “an appealing storyteller” who has seen how American politics work up close, “yet he has remained uncynical.”

Meacham is the best-selling author of “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Bush.” He was asked to give a eulogy at Bush’s December funeral, describing the former president as “a lion who not only led us, but who loved us.”

In 2009, Meacham won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” He also is the author of “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” “Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship,” and “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation.”

A contributing editor at Time magazine and contributing writer to the New York Times Book Review, Meacham is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He’s the former executive editor at Random House and served as editor of Newsweek. Meacham, who began his career at the Chattanooga Times, lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Meacham’s 2018 book, “Soul of America,” will be the topic of discussion at the May 6 “Common Read” forum hosted by Northwest Passages, The Spokesman-Review’s community book club.