“A fabulous way to understand over two millennia of history, all in one book.”

“A rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry . . . Arthur Herman has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.”

“A compulsively readable tribute to ‘the miracle of mass production.”

“A fast-paced narrative history…Herman brings to life the twilight of the British Empire and reminds us how the twists and turns of fate helped propel these two men to their places in history. He shows us that there was more common ground between the two than most realize and that the seemingly simple tale of the imperialist and the nationalist is far more nuanced than it seems.”

“Provocative and well written, the book is really an extended argument, with Herman as interested in skinning liberals as he is in McCarthy’s story.”

“Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist, and Vladimir Lenin, the illiberal totalitarian, hand-in-glove unwound the old nineteenth-century order and redefined war as an existential and global struggle over ideas—with disastrous twentieth-century results. In yet another well-written and fascinating dual biography, the prolific and insightful historian Arthur Herman shows how Wilson’s naive good intentions and Lenin’s deliberate ruthlessness nonetheless had the same pernicious effect of using the state to defy human nature. A fascinating and entirely original explanation of the American and Russian origins of the modern world.”