"American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heros of a Hurricane"
by Walter Isaacson
In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from such notables as Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist.

Isaacson also reflects on how he became a writer, the lessons he learned from various people he met, and the challenges he sees for journalism in the digital age. He offers loving tributes to his hometown of New Orleans, which both before and after Hurricane Katrina offered many of the ingredients for a creative culture, and to the Louisiana novelist Walker Percy, who was an early mentor. In a personal way, Isaacson describes the joys of his life as a writer and the way that tales about the lives of facinating people can enlighten our own lives.